Superior. Angela Saini
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of crops and fish, that it amounted to farming and agriculture.
But whatever they saw, the colonisers didn’t value. For those raised in and around cities, industrialisation is still what represents civilisation. ‘The idea of ranking, say, an industrial society higher than a hunter-gatherer society is absurd,’ reminds Benjamin Smith. It’s not easy to accept when you’ve grown up in a society that tells you concrete skyscrapers are the symbols of advanced culture, but when viewed from the perspective of deep time – across millennia rather than centuries, in the context of long historical trajectories – it becomes clearer. Empires and cities decline and fall. It is smaller, indigenous communities that have survived throughout, those whose societies date to many thousands rather than many hundreds of years. ‘Archaeology shows us that all societies are incredibly sophisticated, they are just sophisticated in different ways,’ Smith continues. ‘These are the world’s thinkers, and maybe they thought themselves into a better place. They have societies that have more leisure time than Western societies, lower suicide rates, higher standards of living in many ways, even though they don’t have all of the technological sophistication.’
Respect for and pride in indigenous cultures has only started to build in the last few decades. And even now, there remains resistance among some non-indigenous Australians, especially as it has become clear from archaeological evidence that Aboriginal people have been occupying this territory not for just thousands of years, but for many tens of thousands. ‘The mid-twentieth century revelation that people were here for that kind of depth of time … was received in many ways as a challenge to a settler nation with a very shallow history. There are cultural anxieties wrapped up in all of this,’ says Griffiths. ‘It challenges the legitimacy of white presence here.’
Among European colonists in the nineteenth century, there was a failure to engage with those they encountered, to accept them as the true inhabitants of the land, combined with a mercenary hastiness to write them off. Alongside the native people of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, whose nakedness and apparent savagery had shocked biologist Charles Darwin when he saw them on his travels, indigenous Australians and Tasmanians were seen as occupying the lowest rungs in the human racial hierarchy. One observer described them as ‘descending to the grave’. They were, Griffiths tells me, seen as doomed to go extinct. ‘That was the dominant concept, that they would soon die out.
‘There was a lot of talk of smoothing the pillow of a dying race.’
Smoothing the pillow was bloodthirsty work. Disease was the greatest killer, the forerunner of invasion. But starting in September 1794, six years after the First Fleet of British ships arrived in what would become Sydney, and continuing into the twentieth century, hundreds of massacres also helped to slowly and steadily shrink the indigenous population by around 80 per cent, according to some estimates. Many hundreds of thousands of people died, if not of smallpox and other illnesses shipped to Australia, then directly at the hands of individuals or gangs, and at other times of police. Equally harsh was the cultural genocide, adds Griffiths. There were bans on the practice of culture and use of language. ‘Many people hid their identity, which also contributed to the decline in population.’
In 1869 the Australian government passed legislation allowing children to be forcibly taken away from their parents, particularly if they were of mixed heritage – described at the time as ‘half-caste’, ‘quarter-caste’ and smaller fractions. An official inquiry into the effects of this policy on the indelibly scarred ‘Stolen Generations’, finally published in 1997, is a catalogue of horrors. In Queensland and Western Australia, people were forced onto government settlements and missions, children removed from about the age of four and placed in dormitories, before being sent off to work at fourteen. ‘Indigenous girls who became pregnant were sent back to the mission or dormitory to have their child. The removal process then repeated itself.’
By the 1930s, around half of Queensland’s Aboriginal Australian population was living in institutions. Life was bleak, with high rates of illness and malnutrition; behaviour was strictly policed for fear that they would return to the ‘immoral’ ways of their home communities. Children were able to leave dormitories and missions only to provide cheap labour, the girls as domestic servants and the boys as farm labourers. They were considered mentally unsuited to any other kind of work. Historian Meg Parsons describes what happened as the ‘remaking of Aboriginal bodies into suitable subjects and workers for White Queensland’.
Among those forced to live this way were the mother and grandmother of Gail Beck, an indigenous activist in Perth who was once a nurse but now works at the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, fighting to reclaim land rights for her local community, the Noongar. When I visit her at her home in the picturesque port city of Fremantle, speaking to her as she cooks, awaiting a visit from the Aboriginal Australian side of her family, I find someone who has few ways to quantify the pain and loss.
Gail is sixty years old but her true family story is still fairly new to her. Until her thirties, she didn’t even know she had any indigenous ancestry. She had been raised to believe she was Italian – a lie to explain her olive skin, her mother terrified that if she were told the truth, Gail might be taken away by the authorities as she herself had been. So she lived under a conspiracy of silence, shielded from the fact that her grandmother had been one of the Stolen Generations, a ‘half-caste’ taken from her family to live in a Catholic missionary home in 1911 at the age of two. There, she had been abused, physically, mentally, sexually. ‘She was put out to service at thirteen. Didn’t get paid, nothing like that. And she stayed there until she was an adult.’ A similar fate befell Gail’s mother, who was under the supervisory care of the nuns in the home from the day she was born, beaten and burned by them when she grew older. The Sisters of Mercy ‘were very cruel people’, Gail recounts.
Learning about her family’s past, and having it confirmed by her grandmother’s papers, was a bolt from the blue. ‘I cried an ocean of tears.’ At once, Gail gained a new identity, one that she was desperate to understand and build a connection to. It took her six years to find the part of her family that had been hidden from her, and she has devoted herself to absorbing their culture ever since. She shows me her blankets and pictures, adorned with the prints for which Aboriginal Australian artists have lately become famous. She has tried to learn an indigenous language, but it has been a struggle. She lives like most white Australians, in a nice house in a nice suburb, her knowledge of her great-grandmother’s way of life, as it would have been, fragmentary.
‘We are constantly in mourning, and people don’t understand that,’ she tells me. ‘The young children that were lost, that doesn’t just affect the nuclear family, that affects the community.’ And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, that the way of life she might have had, the knowledge and language she could have been raised with, the relationship to the local environment, all of this was trodden beneath the boot of what considered itself to be a superior race. After the arrival of the Europeans, even the creation of art sharply declined. It took until 1976 for Aboriginal people even to be able to gain legal rights over their land. Throughout, the victims had no choice. ‘They weren’t allowed to practise their culture, they weren’t allowed to mix and they weren’t allowed to speak their language.’ Having been told they were inferior, that theirs was a life to be ashamed of, they adopted different ways of living – ways they were told were better.
‘It was a real shameful thing.’
*
I don’t cry easily. But in the car afterwards, I cry for Gail Beck. There is no scale of justice weighty enough to account for what happened. Not just for the abuse and the trauma, the children torn from their parents, the killings, but also for the lives that women and men like her didn’t have the chance to live.
In recent decades, as scholars have tried to piece together the past and make sense of what happened, as they share with ordinary Australians in the long process of assessing the damage and its impact, we can see an overarching story about the definition of human difference. It shows us how people have drawn boundaries around other groups of people, and how far inside us and how far back in time the disparities are thought to stretch. These are the parameters of what we now call race.
That same day I meet