Jeff Sparrow - Provocations: New and Selected Writings

In the introduction to this volume of his selected writings, Australian socialist Jeff Sparrow quotes the bushranger Ned Kelly. Kelly had written an 8000 word statement justifying his actions, and as he handed it over he said "This is a little bit of my life; I will give it to you". As Sparrow points out, every writer knows what he meant. This collection certainly showcases the breadth of Sparrow's work. Sparrow is one of the foremost Australian radical writers, and I have reviewed several of his books elsewhere on his blog. But perhaps he is best know for this regular articles, published in a wide range of journals and websites, that discuss politics, history and current events with a distinctly Australian flavour.

Sparrow explains that he is one of a "handful" of socialists that gets to regularly write in the mainstream media. While some of these essays are explicitly political, others show how the best radical writers can  draw out deeper political insights whatever the subject they are dissecting. 

The opening essay tells the story of the Pacific Islanders who were kidnapped ("blackbirded") into indentured slavery on Queensland's sugar plantations. While they weren't slaves in the sense of those Africans forcible moved to the Americas, they were nevertheless brutally treated. Sparrow shows that rather than this being an aberration for Australia's past, the contemporary debates around the issue highlighted some uncomfortable facts about Australia's colonial regime. When the US Civil War broke out, "many Europeans in Australia sympathised with the Confederates" and some expected war between the US and Australia. Sparrow explains, "Queenslanders dreamed of building a 'second Louisiana'. They could, they thought, capitalise on the disruption of the international cotton and sugar trades, if only the could establish a viable local crop."

Getting a viable crop meant getting a workforce and the English workers who arrived wouldn't work in the hot and unpleasant conditions. So "blackbirding" began and between 1863 and 1904 "62,000 South Sea Islanders were transported to Australia. The capitalists who drove this process did so by relying on the "techniques and personnel" of slavery. Yet, as Sparrow explains, they were simultaneously quick to declare their hostility to slavery to "legitimate a generalised racism, which they then presented as a foundation of a new state". The story of the Pacific Islanders in Queensland and their forcible relocation back to their Islands when the practice was banned, once again underlies the racist roots of the current Australian state.

The second essay in the collection explores another aspect of Australian culture - the bushranger, and again deconstructs the traditional accounts. In this case Sparrow explores how "Captain Moonlite", the bushranger Andrew George Scott may well have been in a gay relationship with James Nesbit, one of his gang. Scott hoped that after his execution his body would be buried alongside Nesbit's. This did not happen until an extended campaign by locals to get the body reinterred. We can never know if Scott and Nesbit were gay in the sense we mean today. But as Sparrow points out that is not the point - they exhibited a closeness and friendship that goes against the traditional masculinity normally associated with men of the outback, hinting at a different historical story that challenges contemporary cultural depictions of bushrangers.

Some of the essays here take up contemporary politics. For instance, the brutal treatment of refugees and asylum seekers by the Australian government and the resistance against this. Other essays explore culture and change on a much more general level. I was fascinated by Sparrow's articles exploring children's books, particular Enid Blyton and Captain W.E. Jones. I hadn't realised that I craved a socialist exploration of the Biggles stories as much as I did.

Sparrow writes regularly about environmental and ecological issues. Several essays here take up these themes, again with a distinctly Australian angle. There's a fascinating discussion on the nature of extinction where Sparrow looks at the obsession that there is with finding a "thylacine" an extinct carnivorous marsupial, which ends up being as much and exploration of the people who hope to find one alive, as it does with the tragic loss of the animal itself. 

Sparrow is particularly good at getting people to open up. In the case of the "Queer Bushranger" he discusses LGBT+ issues with one of the local women who campaigned to have Scott reinterred. It's fair to say she doesn't share much of Sparrow's left politics, but he gets her to open up a little about the reality of small town life and what that might mean for gay people. Another example is the man who takes part in war re-enactments, arguing that these are more popular as people seek meaning in "atomised and fractured" neoliberal states.

Reviewing in detail the breadth of essays here would take far to long and would spoil them for other readers. But as a taster I can tell you there are chapters on socialist cycling clubs, the immigrant experience and racism, the strange trend of rewriting classic novels as Zombie horror stories, and gun control. Some of these are deeply serious essays, but they are all shaped by Sparrow's deeply human politics - and on occasion his ready wit.

The essay I wanted to finally mention though was one that moved and shocked me a great deal. It was the story of the tragedy of the 1628 wreck of the Batavia, a horrific incident that saw hundreds of shipwrecked mariners and merchants descend into barbaric behaviour as they ran short of food and rations. I was ignorant of the affair, and Sparrow tells the story through a report of modern archaeology and places it in the context of early capitalism. Sparrow concludes by saying that the story from 400 years ago "illuminated the stories we tell about ourselves today". It is also a comment that is true of all the essays in this book - I encourage you to read it.

Related Reviews

Sparrow - Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating
Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre

Terry Irving - The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe

If you spend much time in the history sections of secondhand bookshops, two books frequently appear - Vere Gordon Childe's Man Makes Himself and his What Happened in History. Both books were enormous bestsellers. In them Childe gives a materialist account of human history, culture and social change. As Terry Irving explains, Childe "was an intellectual who had committed himself to the idea of historical progress and the role of revolutions in history". Childe's books were a popularisation of his ideas, and were extremely popular among non-specialists. But Childe was also committed to the idea of revolutionary social change in his own lifetime. Irving's biography is the first substantial attempt to link Childe's revolutionary socialist and radical politics to his life in the world of archaeology.

Chile was born in 1892. His early life was marked by a world on the brink of imperialist war and growing class struggle, a "pivotal period in Australian politics". While he was at university in Sydney in 1913 a major strike broke out. The strike itself ended quickly, but it shaped Childe's lifelong political thinking. In 1923 he published a book called How Labour Governs, a study of the limitations of Australian Labour in government. In it he would refer to Labor's Premier, Jim McGowen, a lifelong trade unionist calling on the public to "scab" on the 1913 strike. This contrast between the class struggle and parliamentary politics deeply affected Childe, who was by now involved in all the campus radicalism. Childe went to Oxford University in Britain where, despite the conservative nature of the university, its staff and student body, Childe was shaped by a radical milieu. While few Oxford students were Marxists, there was certainly much discussion of Hegel and radicalism, pacifist politics and debates about freedom, democracy and idealism. Childe returned to Australia a more convinced socialist even if he was not yet clear what that meant. 

One of the great strengths of Irving's book is that he places Childe's politics in the context of wider political events. He remarks, "when Childe returned to Sydney he was philosophically a Marxist and therefore a revolutionary. Revolution, however, when applied to Marxist political practice in the early twentieth century, was a capacious term". Irving notes how Marxist (and socialist politics generally) in the period were pulled by different political trends - the reformist ideas of German social democracy and the revolutionary politics as exemplified by Lenin's Bolsheviks. But while Childe was scornful of the "parliamentary road", he was simultaneously unconvinced by Leninism. As Irving writes:

Childe dismissed the orthodox Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist understanding of revolution as 'alluringly vague as far as its initial stages are concerned. But what was the alternative? While he was in Australia he was not impressed by the Bolshevik example. Rather, as he was drawn into the anti-war movement, he discovered the militancy of the industrial unionists, and Labor's experience of government. He was no longer in Britain where everything to him seemed so bloody because of the Labour Party's 'loyalty' to parliament and constitutionalism. In Australia, the militancy of the 'industrialists' had swept many thousands of workers into a mass strike. Was it possible that forming the Labor party might provide a non-violent but still revolutionary transition to socialism?

These were questions that would shape Childe's politics intellectually and practically. Reading Irving it becomes clear that in fact Childe never succeeded in squaring the circle of his rejection of Bolshevik style revolutionary practice and his understanding of the limitations of parliamentarianism. In part this comes from Childe's own lack of surety about his own role as an intellectual. Irving quotes an interesting letter written by Childe in 1918:

When in England I was I'm afraid inclined to be impatient with a certain vacillation of the intellectual liberals. Now I can appreciate the enormous service such a class renders when I see the deplorable results of its absence. In many ways I am delighted with the growing radicalism of the Labor Party and the Trade Union Movement here [in Australia], but I would infinitely prefer reconciliation and compromise to revolution. If the latter is forced upon the Labor Movement it will be entirely due to the unscrupulousness and bigotry of the professional and educated classes.

From this one gets a sense that Childe saw "revolution" at that time as a failure, the consequence of enlightened intellectuals being unable to direct the radical movement to a peaceful transition. But it also reflects a naive understanding of how radical change could be won. This I think reflects Childe's reading of Marxism, from which he failed to gain an understanding of the capitalist state. He was unable to grasp that a "non-violent" transition to socialism was not possible because of the state and thus failed to see the importance of Bolshevik strategy. This limitation also made it through to his theories of historical change, and I'll return to that shortly.

Firstly however it is important to explain that Irving wasn't rejecting class struggle, or militant politics. Indeed, as Irving emphasises, quite the opposite. On arriving back in Sydney Childe "welcomes the growing radicalism of the working class" and is shocked by the violence of the capitalists in return. It is a moment of personal development where, as Irving says, Childe "imagines middle-class socialists and pacifists as missionaries to the ruling class, explaining the inevitable victory of the 'world of labour'." The role of the intellectual as a "mediator" in the class struggle is clearly significant to Childe. Childe himself tried to play such a role during struggles, writing to the press to protest the treatment of political prisoners and the violence of government repression in the aftermath of the September 1918 red flag riots.

But it is clear that Childe was taking an idealistic position on the class struggle. While understanding the limits of parliamentarianism, Childe's rejection of revolution essentially forces him into a reformist position. It is notable, for instance, that Childe didn't attend the 1919 celebrations of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He never joined the Communist Party in Australia or later in England, but such nuances were lost on his critics and political opponents (and the Secret Services) who denounced him as a Communist revolutionary. 

In Childe's How Labor Governs he sets out to examine the limitations of reformism. It focuses, as Irving says, on "the likelihood of a labour party governing in the interest of the working class". He started from "an understanding of capitalism's class dynamics and their expression in the system of liberal representative government". As such How Labor Governs was one of the first attempts by a Marxist to grapple with the nature of reformism through studying the reality of Labour in government. Rosa Luxembourg had explored the economic basis of reformism in her book Reform or Revolution, but few other Marxists had the experience to develop these ideas. The lack of parliamentary politics and legal trade unionism in Russia prior to the Revolution of 1917 meant that the Communist International didn't really comprehend the political problems associated with parliamentarianism and trade union bureaucracy. As such Childe's book was of great importance. 

Childe shows how a reformist strategy cannot work, and how the workers' representatives can end up sucked into the system itself, more interested in "keeping his seat and scoring political points than of carrying out the idea that he was sent in to give effect to". But Childe is ambiguous on the political consequences of his own insights. In fact, Childe focuses on a syndicalist approach that sees industrial trade unionism as leading towards social change. Irving explains the "practical nature" of Childe's socialism in a revealing section:

One of the themes of [Childe's] intervention in the debate about the One Big Union was to caution the industrialists against relying on alluring but vague ideas about revolution. Instead he insisted on the value of practising collective self-management in state enterprises, even if it were only in the quarries at Bombo, a hamlet one the South Coast of New South Wales. Now we can grasp his idea of progress. This politics of revolutionary practice entailed an idea of progress that was not evolutionary, something emerging out of the preceding history of liberal self-government, as it was to the intellectuals of official labour. The idea of progress had to be taken away from them and reimagined as the creation of new values by a self-acting workers' movement, as a revolutionary and history making 'alteration in the social structure'. This was the view of progress that his four years in the Australian socialist movement reinforced, and which in time underlay his archaeological theorising.

Here we can see how Childe has broken with Labourism as a strategy, has a clear belief and desire for an "alteration in the social structure" but has no real clarity on what this means other than workers' making their own democracy and the nationalisation of industry. Childe clearly saw the class struggle as a vehicle for this change, but failed to see that class struggle on its own will not bring revolutionary change. The movement will have to defeat the state itself. Essentially Childe was hoping for peaceful change, even though he could clearly see that would not happen through parliament. Indeed Childe could be damning about this: "the Labour platform can give the workers no real improvement in position under capitalism, it offers them no escape from capitalism".

Irving argues that the framework outlined in the quote above is echoed in Childe's first breakthrough work on prehistory that appeared at a similar time, The Dawn of European Civilisation. In this work Childe argued for a "materialist concept of progress, and of history as a story of progress, a process created by practical activity, by human labour". 

When I first read Childe's What Happened in History I was enthused by this materialist approach, but dismayed by his framing. He essentially says that human history was, and would be, a process of gradual upward development. But because Childe cannot grasp the role of the state as an instrument of class rule that arises out of the unavoidable struggle between exploiter and exploited he fails to see that positive historical progress is not inevitable. The state is a break on progress, and can - as Childe must have seen in the archaeological record - lead to civilisations stagnating or disappearing. In the capitalist epoch it is a barrier to the development of socialism which must be "smashed". Childe, however, sees the state as neutral in this struggle. He was very much the "neo Hegelian" he described himself as. It is an ambiguity that Childe was never able to shake off. As Irving says about Childe's vision of socialist democracy:

For Childe, proletarian democracy described something elemental: the desire for self-government of the working class. In this respect Childe was not at odds with Lenin. His framing idea, however, did not have the Leninist aim of protecting and extending the proletarian revolution. Rather... Childe frames the problem of proletarian democracy as one of developing a form of representation that would protect its integrity within the existing bourgeois parliament.

Irving cautions that despite the limitations in Childe's approach we shouldn't see Lenin as a "bold revolutionary and Childe as a cautious dabbler in working-class politics". He argues that Childe had "a growing affinity with Lenin's revolutionary perspective". This is probably fair, but Childe did not take the next step which would have been to become an open partisan for revolutionary politics inside the fledgling Communist Parties of the 1920s. 

That said it is important to defend Childe. He was an intellectual dedicated to a vision of socialism and trying to understand the type of organisation and movements needed to achieve a socialist society. Despite his later success as a populariser of archaeology and Marxist history, his career was badly damaged by the principled positions he took, and there is no doubt he understood the consequences of his sacrifices. It is sad then that the recognition he has today is mostly around his historical work, which is sanitised and divorced from his politics - the very thing that he devoted his life to.

Terry Irving's book is then a very important contribution for several reasons. He rescues Childe the revolutionary and ties this to Childe the archaeologist. He also takes the reader on a journey through the political and intellectual milieu that shaped Childe, in particular the class struggle of the early 20th century. By placing Childe's near forgotten book How Labor Governs at the heart of the story Irving will also show a new generation of intellectuals and activists the limitations of parliamentary politics and that there are radically different ways of approaching the question of social transformation. 

On a personal note I was privileged to finish reading The Fatal Lure of Politics the day before a visit to Skara Brae, a neolithic site in Orkney where Childe made some of his most important excavations. While the museum there makes no comment on Childe's politics it was personally moving to see his work and put it in the context of his hope for a better, socialist, future. It is very much in this spirit that Terry Irving has written this political biography and I hope many socialists and archaeologists pick it up.

Related Reviews

Childe - What happened in history

Paul Howarth - Only Killers and Thieves

In Queensland 1885, two boys Tommy and Billy McBride return home to find their family slaughtered. Their farm life had been precarious. Drought had practically wiped out their father's heard, and their mother could no longer get credit in the nearby town shops. Their local neighbour, John Sullivan, a ruthless, greedy man, hates Tommy and Billy's father - but it is to him they must turn when it looks like an aboriginal group has killed their family. 

The boys are pulled into a hunt by the Queensland Native Police, led by the violent Noone. As they, with Noone and Sullivan trek into the desert to find the aboriginal's responsible, the reader follows them deep into Australia, and a dark, racist past were all native people are "killers and thieves" and their only punishment in murder.

This is a difficult read. In places it's description of the treatment of aboriginal people at the hands of the militia is sickening - there is murder and rape. The boys are pulled into culpability for these crimes of revenge, even as Noone (and wider white society) gives them a gloss of legality.

Despite the difficult subject matter, this is a powerful novel about the racist genocide of the aboriginal people. The strength of the book is to put the tragic story of Tommy and Billy into this wider context. I came away from it feeling like I'd received physical blows, and at times had to rest from reading it. But this is a story that tells us a great deal about how colonial Australia developed and I was thinking about it many days after finally putting it down.

Related Reviews

Shute - A Town Like Alice

James Boyce - Van Diemen's Land

The arrival of British colonists in Van Diemen's Land had dramatic consequences for the people that lived their, the land and the region's ecology. In this compelling history James Boyce explores what took place, putting the experience of ordinary people at the forefront of the story. He opens by arguing that the "common apprehension that 'almost everything the settler did was a re-creation of the world which had been left behind' reflects the experience of a relatively small elite." In fact, precisely because there was "more than one Britain" those who came to Van Diemen's Land brought with them a multitude of ideas, experiences and ideas. The country needs, he argues, to be understood as a "convict society" not an extension of Britain, but one shaped by the experiences of those who arrived and a society made anew. 

While Boyce never forgets the impact of European arrival on the aboriginal people who lived in Van Diemen's Land, he explains that his book is "not an Aboriginal history", it "does not pretend to describe Aboriginal culture, strategy or political organisation", the focus is on the convicts and the society they created. Of course this does mean talking about relations with the Aboriginal people and their later systematic destruction. Boyce suggest his work is really a "environmental history", because it's "primary interest is how the environment changed" the settlers. Wary that this summary could be interpreted as me saying Boyce doesn't devote enough time to the Aboriginal people, I should emphasise that the author's extensive appendices describe the genocide in detail and how it arose out of the interests of the new ruling class in Van Diemen's Land / Tasmania and the interests of British colonial rule. 

The early, convict, years in Van Diemen's Land are fascinating insight into the world that the convicts, settlers and guards had left behind. Boyce notes that the health of the new outpost was better than that of the class the convicts came from. There was plenty of food and game, land and space. But it didn't remain like this for long. Right from the start England's vile game laws were imposed on the new colony. Boyce summarises the reasons for this:

[T]he main challenge for the authorities was how to restrict food supply. Control of the island's abundant natural resources was recognised as essential to the maintenance o social order and penal discipline. The native animals of the new land were... assumed to be the property of the Crown...The game laws were seen as integral to a stable social order. In Van Diemen's Land during 1804, convicts ate emu and kangaroo, but they had to work for it.

The officers had a monopoly on hunting and thus fresh meat, and this meant they could employ convicts to work for them outside their normal working hours. Thus the game laws helped create both a market for game and strengthened particular social relations.

Simultaneously, outside the lands formally under British control, convicts were able to live a surprisingly free life:

Under the "thirds" system, the Van Diemonian elite offered their convict workers economic independence and social freedom in return for free, motivated labour and guaranteed returns. Stock owners, often resident in the towns, handed over a flock or herd to a worker prepared to risk frontier life and payed him a portion (usually a third) of the natural increase in lieu of wages. The custodian took the animals to the leased or granted land.. while he watched over the animals... while making extra money for flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and run by selling kangaroo skins. 

Indeed the inability of the authorities to control the convicts and the sheer amount of land meant that many simply slipped into the bush. There some created their own lives and space, and Boyce notes that as the colonial developed the escape to the bush, and the "bushranging" mode of life was particularly associated with a concept of freedom that went far beyond simply not being a convict. In fact the scale of this was, in Boyce's words, nothing less than a "collective convict uprising that would pose a potent challenge to imperial power". Such was the scale of this, that it would be a generation before the situation was brought under control. 

There is one further aspect to the story that should be emphasised in this review. This was, what might be called, a reassertion of power by the British authorities. In part this was physical. A new generation of settlers who had nothing to do with the convict system arrived. They parcelled up the land and wrested it back from those who had farmed it before - these were usually convicts who had served their time, but also those working in the "thirds" system. There's an irony here, that this was, in effect a new version of enclosure - land was taken by the wealthy and powerful, and transformed - Boyce emphasises - into a copy of pastoral England. Boyce describes this as a "mass eviction". He also notes that the language used to describe "ordinary Van Diemonian life" by the new arrivals and the authorities was "strikingly similar to the judgements passed on the highland Scvots and rural Irish" at similar times. These were savages who had to be kicked off the land in the interest of a modern (capitalist) agriculture. As one new immigrant said in a letter home "we all came here to make money".

Alongside the redistribution of land from the convict era settlers came a transformation of relations with the indigenous people. While the earlier relations with the Aboriginal people had never been easy -they were often violent. But a balance had been achieved, mostly because the colonial areas were relatively geographically contained. Now, however the aboriginal people posed a threat to the expansion of the colonies, and they had to be eradicated. Boyce's descriptions of the way this was done - systematic lies, violence, rape and murder are difficult, but essential reading. There was no real economic justification for this, Boyce points out that aboriginal resistance had been stopped by military action. But nontheless there was no place in the new country for its original inhabitants. Van Diemen's Land was renamed as Tasmania, in part to sever the mental link with the convict society, but also as a means to forget the original inhabitants. Tasmania though was built on the blood and violent dispersal of the Aborigines.

Its worth noting that Boyce argues that the policy of forced removal of the Aboriginal people was never "presented to, let alone sanctioned by, the Colonial Office in London". It was, he argues, "primarily a local affair". While organisationally this is no doubt true, I think the genocidal behaviour towards the indigenous people can only be understood in the context of a "mindset" created by British colonial policy. As Tom Lawson says in his book on the Tasmanian genocide, The Last Man:

[The authorities in Van Dieman's Land were] trapped within a mindset that they could not recognise made little sense even on its own terms. They were committed to a path that continually sanctioned a greater and greater degree of force, while arguing that force should be avoided. With every approval they opened up new possibilities for violence even while they continued to condemn violence itself. The British government preached protection [of the aboriginal people], while contrarily approving of measure after measure that would escalate violence. It was, at the very least, a form of self-deception.

While the British government may not have been explicitly clear on what was happening on the ground, (indeed they were actively deceived by the authorities) what took place fitted a wider, colonial, pattern. I am sure that Boyce wouldn't particularly disagree with this, but I felt it needed to be more explicit. 

Nonetheless this is a remarkable history. Boyce concludes:

The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between white settlers and the Aborigines -a well-record and much-discussed aspect of the British conquest - but the government-sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it.

By placing the story of what happened to the Aboriginal people in the wider context of the transformations wrought upon Van Diemen's Land by the original "convict society" and then the further tragedies that took place, James Boyce has exposed the dirty, violent, underbelly to colonial conquest in this part of the world. It is a story that must be understood and this book is an excellent account.

Related Reviews

Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Lawson - The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania
Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact

Callum Clayton-Dixon - Surviving New England

The story of European colonialism in Australia is often told as being essentially about the peaceful arrival of settlers who set about farming the empty and fertile landscape. In these narratives, where the aboriginal people make an appearance, it is usually peripheral. In colonial histories the people who had lived in Australia "since the first sunrise" were uncivilised tribes that made little impact upon the lands around them and could be safely assimilated into European "civilisation". As authors like Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe have shown, however, the aboriginal people of Australia were far from uncivilised. The carefully husbanded the land, had extensive and complex societies and were accomplished farmers as well as hunters and gatherers. 

But they also resisted. They organised collectively to defend and protect their land from the Europeans who despoiled, murdered, raped and dispossessed the original population. This story of resistance is one that has rarely been told, so Callum Clayton-Dixon's new book Surviving New England is an important account of the neglected history of the "first forty years of the colonial apocalypse" in Australia. Drawing on original archival material and contemporary newspaper accounts Clayton-Dixon has found a plethora of material that tells a story of aboriginal resistance. The material tells a colonial story, but the author shows how it actually tells the story of a collective fightback against colonialism.

Resistance included the stealing of animals, the killing of settlers and their animals and the destruction of European infrastructure. On occasion, from the 1830s to the 1860s this effectively became guerrilla warfare that held back colonial encroachment further into tribal lands.

For Clayton-Dixon, the book is also a deeply personal one. His discovery of the forgotten history of resistance in New England Tableland is in part spurred by his discovery of his own family history - tracing his ancestry back to the aboriginal people of the area. Clayton-Dixon is part of a project to revive the Anaiwan Language and the book is thus a contribution to reasserting the history of the people of the region.

The book is not an easy read. Settler violence against aboriginal people was systematic. It was not committed by a few racist individuals. It was part of a systemic approach to colonial expansion. When contemporary accounts decry the violence of the aboriginal people against settlers they very rarely acknowledge what was happening to the people, their land and their culture. Clayton-Dixon quotes a 1840 report by the Aborigines' Protect Society, which uses "New England as a specific case":

The sheep stations of the settlers are extending, and proportionably diminishing the resources of the natives, thus producing a warfare which reflects most injuriously upon the interests of the first, and threatens the extermination of the last... The land is wholly and unreservedly the settler's- the native is wholly and unreservedly dispossessed... Justice is hard to administer, famine is decreed to one party, and the fruits of spoliation to another... The native attacks the settler's flocks-the settler retaliates, and perhaps a native is killed. The settler had only exercised an acknowledged right when he defended his sheep, thought it were against the hard necessities of the aboriginal disturber of them, and his crime is thus reduced to one of self-defence! This is the state of things brought about by a system of colonisation, which presents the alternative of famine or murder to the natives...

Let us be clear that the strategy of the colonial authorities was the utter destruction of aboriginal people and their culture. Those that weren't murdered would be "assimilated" into European culture. The "seeds of assimilation" as Clayton-Dixon calls them "were sown very early on. Their growth would be accelerated by the sheer intensity and rapidity of the Tableland's colonisation". Aboriginal people were encouraged to work on farms and in industry, often out of necessity, but also making them dependent on Europeans for food, tobacco, clothing and, tragically, alcohol. But this was the end of a process whose beginnings were rooted in violence.

It is "virtually impossible" says the author to get "even a rough estimate of how many Aboriginal people were killed as a result of frontier violence" but it "must have comprised a sizeable proportion of the Tableland's relatively small Aboriginal population". Violence wasn't simply murder. It was also the poisoning of people and the destruction of the natural resources that kept them alive (for instance the use of waterways to wash sheep contaminating water supplies). 

Reading the contemporary, murderous accounts, it is inspiring then to read of the resistance. In one account from 1839 the writer inadvertently gives a sense of the fear with which the colonialists felt from the resistance. The aborigines "now think that they can do just as they please with the people at out-stations... I wish you would send up a few pounds of gunpowder and buck shot, and about a dozen good muskets, as we must not be sacrificed by these merciless savages without using every effort to avert it". The same year "settlers complained that Commissioner Macdonald and his men lacked the capacity to effectively check Aboriginal resistance". For years settlers had to carry weapons with them, for fear of the aboriginal people who could "disappear in a moment  amongst the rocks from the whites".

Sadly the resistance was eventually defeated. Disease, superior firepower and the loss of so much land undermined even the most determined fight-back. But as Clayton-Dixon reminds the reader the resistance was important: "Our ancient society was plunged into absolute chaos, and the traumas of this early period remain cared deeply into the land and its people. But because of our ancestors' struggles, their staunch resistance, their unyielding determination to survive, we are still here".

Today Australia's neo-liberal government rules in the name of capital. The Australian people, the land and the environment are trampled over in the interest of profit. Callum Clayton-Dixon's book is an important reminder of a different tradition - one of resistance to the transformation of the land into a space for the creation of profit. Its a tradition that we must remember - in order to make sure that there is justice today for those whose ancestors were murdered, raped and dispossessed so that they can "restore the deeply spiritual and reciprocal relationship with country that our old people maintained since the first sunrise."

Related Reviews

Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact
Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada

Tom Lawson - The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania

The story of the British arrival in Tasmania (known then as Van Diemen's Land) and the subsequent genocide of the aboriginal people who lived there is rarely discussed. It has parallels with events in other colonial nations, particularly in mainland Australia. But, as Tom Lawson's convincing but  tragic book shows, this was a genocide that was made in London and needs to be understood in the wider context of British colonial policy.

Lawson is a Holocaust scholar and he explains that he came to write about this subject after looking at the depiction and understanding of the Holocaust and genocide in society. As such this book is not a detailed history of what took place in Tasmania, though there is enough to make those who do not know the general history understand that this was a period of horrific events against the aboriginal population. An early massacre of aboriginal people at the first settlement at Risdon Cove was horrific enough, but the British turned this into an explanation for the aboriginal resistance that they experienced, which required a response in turn. In other words, the British argued that the victims were the cause of their genocide - which combined with racist prejudices formed the backdrop to subsequent events. As Lawson explains:

The idea that the island's [Tasmania] people had been prompted to an indiscriminate vengeance by the massacre, a passion which sustained them and their descendants over the next 30 years, tells us much about the assumption that the British brought with them to Van Diemen's Land. Tasmanians were not, they supposed, capable of rational thought or action. Indeed the belief that indigenous peoples across the Empire were essentially childlike, incapable of meaningful communal or political action, underpinned the very basis of the British occupation of the land. It was widely believed that an imagined failure of such peoples to exploit the resources of the land provided the moral and legal basis of colonisation.

The British considered that a "state of war" existed, which basically legitimised their actions. But their prejudices about the indigenous peoples also affected what they wanted done. "No longer would the communities be able to pursue their nomadic, migratory culture. Instead they would be reliant for sustenance on a colonial authority that wished to enclose them permanently."

The contradictory interests of the British and the aboriginal people "could only be resolved by force", and the power was in the hands of the colonists. Lawson explains about the colonial authority in Tasmania that it was

trapped within a mindset that they could not recognise made little sense even on its own terms. They were committed to a path that continually sanctioned a greater and greater degree of force, while arguing that force should be avoided. With every approval they opened up new possibilities for violence even while they continued to condemn violence itself. The British government preached protection [of the aboriginal people], while contrarily approving of measure after measure that would escalate violence. It was, at the very least, a form of self-deception.

This last point is important. Some historians have argued that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of the British on the ground. Lawson, in contrast, argues that it was British policy that encouraged genocide. Since violence was considered a legitimate response to resistance from the aboriginal people, then massacres became acceptable. In passing its worth noting that much of this violence was committed by convicts sent to Tasmania. As Lawson points out "their violence was directed at the only people in their world less powerful than themselves." The role of convicts, undesirables, in the eyes of the British government would become an excuse for many for what took place in Tasmania.

Lawson points out that the British government select committee that was setup to examine the aboriginal people's condition reflected a "class-based discourse" that saw the violence as arising out of sending "Britain's own savages" abroad. But we should not lose sight of the fact that genocide came from colonial policies that saw indigenous peoples as occupying land that they could not and would not use, and that colonialism could both use those resources and transform the aborigines into model British citizen Christian farmers. In the eyes of the British, when they refused to conform, the aboriginal people were doomed to an inevitable decline.

Liberal and progressives in Britain also saw this inevitable decline arising out of a similar process. If Britain was the height of technical and intellectual achievement than "lesser" peoples were doomed in the face of British arrival. Perhaps most fascinatingly and distressingly, Lawson shows how this approach pervades attitudes to indigenous remains and relics that were in British museums until recently. Efforts to get human remains and important cultural objects back to Tasmania were, on several occasions, met with responses from authorities which assumed that either the Tasmanian people must be extinct or that they could not look after the objects themselves.

This is a remarkable book that deserves a wider readership than it appears to have had. Lawson argues clearly that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of  of the British Colonial Office's "commitment to the relentless pursuit of colonial development". But he goes further and argues that the horrific, forgotten events of this time, mean that "when we think about the British Empire we should remember the violence on which it was based, and when we think about genocide we should remember that it is part of our world too".

Tom Lawson's book is an important contribution to post-colonial studies of British Empire and a must read for anyone trying to understand Australian politics as well as contemporary debates around genocide.

Related Reviews

Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact

Bill Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write "nature, the nature that preceded human history...is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)". They were arguing that the natural world is transformed by humans, constantly recreated and rebuilt. It is an insight that kept returning to me as I read Bill Gammage's excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth. Gammage's contention is that the Australian landscape as seen by European colonial explorers, settlers and convicts post-1788 (the date of first arrival of the British first fleet) was not natural, pristine or untouched and certainly not terra nullius. Rather as the author says, "there was no wilderness". The Australian landscape was shaped by thousands of years of careful, planned human labour.

But this is not what those arriving from Europe saw. Instead they tended to interpret the landscape as a natural collection of park-like spaces. As Gammage explains "Almost all thought no land in Australia private, and parks natural. To think otherwise required them to see Aborigines as gentry, not shiftless wanderers. That seemed preposterous."

The reference here to gentry relates to the fact that hundreds of European accounts (Gammage quotes dozens and dozens of examples) describe the landscape as often being "park like". Park, at this time, referred to the type of landscapes created by wealthy British landowners. They were rich enough to leave landscapes laid out for pleasure - not to produce food, or generate wealth. It is, as Gammage suggests, peculiarly myopic to see these perceived landscapes and equate them with parkland in Europe, and conclude that they cannot have been artificial. It is also a view imbued with racism and class.

Much of the book looks at exactly how and why the aboriginal people shaped the land. There is a brilliantly illustrated section (in full colour) that uses paintings and old photographs as well as contemporary images to show how the landscape changed after 1788 when the land wasn't burnt back. Burning was the key way that land was cleared and the clearance allowed food to be grown or helped with the hunting of animals like kangaroo. The changes also meant that the destruction of aboriginal communities was also written into the landscape. Take this picture Mills' Plains by John Glover (circa 1832-1834).

Gammage writes:

Glover shows Tasmanians. They were not there in 1832, for in 1828-30 they were shot or rounded up by bounty hunters like Glover's neighbour John Batman. Glover knew this. He captioned his [painting] Batman's Lookout, Ben Lomond (1835) 'on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives'. Yet he depicts not only their presence, but their absence. His Mills' Plains foreground shows young gums, wattles and casuarinas which all regenerate quickly after fire. They are young because Tasmanians burnt the old; they are there because Tasmanian burning was stopped. They are the first generation for decades not to get burnt, so their height measures the end of Tasmanian dominion.

Ironically the lack of burning also meant that some flora and fauna went extinct. The burning encouraged particular growth, or created ecological niches that were needed by certain animals. The end of burning led, for instance, "to the extinction or decline of over a third of small desert animals species."

The recent extreme bushfires in Australia have reawakened debate about how a return to regular backburning could help prevent future catastrophic fires. Gammage certainly provides ample evidence that this is true. But he also makes it clear that it wouldn't be easy. The Aboriginal people had thousands of years of experience and even sympathetic attempts to recreate this have failed: "They knew which fire regime worked" he writes. That said, the effects could be dramatic. As Gammage explains, Aboriginal people rarely had to deal with enormous fires because they rarely happened - because "people had to prevent it, or die". Gammage recounts a story from the 1870s:

When a fire menaced the station while its men were away, an [Aboriginal] elder studied the flames, then organised women and children to light spot fires in five staggered rows across the advancing front. This broke up the fire and it was put out."

But these skills with fire arose from long experience and a particular understanding of the natural ecology. I don't have space to cover Gammage's explanation of Aboriginal understanding of their relationship to history and space. But the "Law" he describes is an obligation on everyone to manage and protect the land as it was and is.

All must care for the and and its creatures, all must be regenerated by care and ceremony, no soul must be extinguished, no totem put at risk, no habitat too much reduced. That mandate, not the theology, made land care purposeful, universal and predictable. This is true of very part, even what might seem untouched wilderness, and even where ecologists today can't see why. The parks and puzzles Europeans saw in 1788 were no accident.

Thus the shaping of landscape was not technological, it was something that arose out of the very understanding that Aboriginal people had of the land and their place in it. There's a tragic story that demonstrates this, told by Gammage, of a small band of Tasmanian people, decimated by the colonial powers, who continued to fire the landscape, doing the work of ten times their number, to try and maintain the land - even though the smoke would betray their existence.

This approach can be contrasted with the settlers who saw the land with very different eyes. It is summed by a quote from 1864 by a surveyor WCB Wilson who wrote:

heavy showers fell which had a wonderful effect upon the hitherto parched up ground innumerable bulbous roots shooting up their long green stems in every direction and clothing the earth with a profusion of flowers.... It is very delightful to contemplate Nature in her holiday garbs, but unfortunately both the flowers and the coarse green grass are intrinsically worthless.

Gammage comments that Wilson "didn't value anything much". But here, summarised, is the new capitalist approach to land as a source of value. The landscapes that the Aboriginal people created where particularly prized by settlers, not simply for the clear areas, but also for the management of water courses, or the holding back of particular plants. But once they had control the Settlers couldn't maintain these landscapes and massive bush-fires are just one ecological consequence. Before 1788 Australia was very different, but so were the societies that lived there. Gammage concludes:

'Man' made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one. In the Great Sandy Desert women replanted yam tops and scattered millet on soft sand, then watched the seasons: millet crops a year after its first rain. This is farming, but not being a farmer. Doing more would have driven them out of the desert. Mobility let them stay. It imposed a strict and rigid society, but it was an immense gain. It gave people abundant food and leisure, and it made Australia a single estate. Instead of dividing Aborigines into gentry and peasantry, it made them a free people.

Marx and Engels pointed out that examining the economic basis to a society enabled you to understand its structures and social relations. Aboriginal society was based on a different relationship to the land and that enabled a much more equitable and sustainable world. Capitalism is the negation of that. Replacing capitalism with a sustainable world will not mean a return to the aboriginal communities from before 1788. But it will mean learning from their relationship with the land to ensure that future generations can enjoy it.

Bill Gammage's excellent and book is a powerful exploration of how we can understand non-capitalist social relations. He shows how modern Australia arose out of the destruction of a way of life, and consequently a landscape. He challenges racist myths about Australia's indigenous people and reminds us that things do not have to be like they are.

Related Reviews

Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Dark Emu is a remarkable book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. Firstly it is a fascinating discussion of the history and culture of Australia's Aboriginal people before European colonial arrival. But it is also a brilliant, and very readable, account of how that history was distorted, covered-up and forgotten in order for the colonial powers to develop their own political and economic structures that benefited a new capitalist order.

I suspect that most people who pick up Dark Emu might believe, at best naively, that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers before the arrival of Europeans. Using primary and secondary sources Bruce Pascoe shows that this is completely erroneous and, Pascoe argues, prevents us developing a clearer understanding of both historical Aboriginal society and how that relates to contemporary political, environmental and social politics:

Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gather system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession. Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did nothing more than collect available resources and therefore had no managed interaction with the land... If we look at the evidence... and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their closes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, Aboriginal, pre-contact society was not just one of nomadic hunter-gatherers, though, as Pascoe points out that does not mean there were no communities like this.

It may be that not all Aboriginal peoples were involved in these practices, but if the testament of explorers and first witnesses is to be believed, mos Aboriginal Australians were, at the very least, in the early states of an agricultural society, and, it could be argued, ahead of many other parts of the world.

But the crucial thing is that Aboriginal societies were dynamic - they changed and evolved. And in most areas, by the time of European arrival, Aboriginal communities had developed complex systems of agriculture, aquaculture and villages.  For instance, Pascoe describes the work of archaeologist Heather Builth who shows how a complex system of fish traps at Brewarrina, in NW New South Wales, supported a community of about 10,000 people in a "more or less sedentary life in this town". With such a large population, people would have needed to store food and Builth shows how food was smoked and stored and "formed the basis of trade with regions in New South Wlaes, South Australia and other parts of Victoria".

The evidence for complex human society (particularly agriculture) from archaeological sources as well as records of early European colonists and explorers is incredible. What is even more shocking is the way that this evidence is dismissed, ignored and hidden. Part of the reason for this is the racism of the European eyewitnesses. There is an incredible example of this from the accounts of James Kirby who , in 1843, explored an area which not not yet seen European colonisation. He describes (using racist language) an ingenious fishing device whereby people fished with an rod in tension that when triggered by a fish, "threw the fish over the head of the black [the Aboriginal fisher], who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again". Kirby interprets this in the most racist way. Rather than be amazed at the semi-automated fishing system, he says he has "often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true".

All human societies transform the landscape they inhabit. This is not usually recognised about the Aboriginal people because of the inherent racist assumption that they were savages who existed simply through an negative relationship with their environment. Again, the opposite is true. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, a section that has particular resonance given the recent horrific wildfires in Australia, Pascoe shows how Aboriginal agriculture frequently relied on regular firing of the bush to encourage conditions for improved farming. Europeans, on arrival, feared fire and so they didn't use it to clear land. Ironically this encourages the conditions for more power fires, and undermined the fertility of the land itself: "Changing the timing and intensity of fires radically changed the nature of the country, so that what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade." Fire was "part of a planned program of cropping or". This has implications for how we understand the Australian landscape. Pascoe quotes archaeologist Rhys Jones:

What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788 or do we yearn for an environment without mas, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago? If the former then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions. 

But this also has implications for continued agricultural practices that, driven by the desire to maximise profits, encourage environmental degradation and make fires more likely.

Pascoe doesn't pretend that Aboriginal societies were without conflict. Though he does point out that judging Aboriginal society by standards of European "civilisation" means that you miss the democratic, sustainable, non-hierarchical society that was able to provide for the needs of thousands of people for centuries. Nonetheless I think Pascoe is guilty of some naivety when it comes to understanding why, for instance, European societies were brutal and exploitative, and Aboriginal societies were not. It is clear, for instance, that class society had not developed in Aboriginal communities - historical development elsewhere in the world demonstrates that the invention of agricultural allows the creation of a surplus which can (I emphasise can) lead to the development of class society. When European colonialists arrived and smashed up Aboriginal society any further development was ended. What Pascoe makes clear is that had this development not been prevented, the peoples of Australia may well have begun the long historical road to further evolution of society - the had clearly already begun to develop complex agricultural based societies. But it is not inevitable that any future development would have retained social mores that made Aboriginal society so different to that which supplanted it.

Pascoe's use of source material shows what had long been hidden. Aboriginal societies, prior to the arrival of Europeans, were complex and extensive. But I am not sure how unique this is. Pascoe makes some reference to other pre-capitalist, indigenous societies. This could have been developed more and I think would have illuminated the way that capitalism has only succeeded through the destruction of other modes of production. Unfortunately for the limited analysis of this aspect of his argument Pascoe relies on the work of Gavin Menzies, whose work has been discredited.

However this does not discredit the arguments that Pascoe is making. In fact, I'd suggest that Dark Emu is one of the most important contributions to understanding the Aboriginal history that has been hidden and forgotten. It is also a powerful critique of contemporary Australian society - a society where the very land burns because profit is more important than people.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance