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Book Review
| Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2005. pp. xxv + 467. $39.95 paper.
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In 1885, just over a century before Richard Broome began Aboriginal Victorians, 'a large deputation from the Aborigines' Friends' Association, accompanied by a number of influential citizens', called upon South Australia's Minister for the Northern Territory (then a South Australian possession) to protest about the slaughter of Aboriginal people in the Far North. Alfred Gore, a member of the delegation, was reported in the Adelaide press as remonstrating that the
value of the life of the blackfellow in the Northern Territory was underrated. The things done towards the blacks would not bear repetition. If one tithe were reported in the newspapers an outcry would at once be raised. He could produce a diary that would reveal a state of things they had no conception of. It could be proved that the outrages by blacks had arisen from what had gone before (Newspaper Cuttings on the Northern Territory, in State Records of South Australia, GRS9, vol. 1, 1883–90, 8 December 1885).
The Minister expressed concern, but the Association's influence upon public opinion was minimal. The Association's protest was well justified; it was eloquently stated and well supported by evidence. But it did not sway opinion. The reason was not so much that the deputation comprised Europeans speaking on behalf of disempowered Aboriginal people. It was that Gore did not produce his diary! |
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Is there a parallel with Broome's Aboriginal Victorians? This is a book long in careful preparation time, compelling in its arguments, and comprehensive in its coverage. But will it decisively sway public opinion? Its ability to do so is, I think, constrained by its conventional historical framework: Broome has constructed an historical narrative about Aboriginal Victorians which in its general tone has partially obscured the sharp-edged particularities of experience that are to be found in Gore's Northern Territory diary and in the 'grass-roots style' (p. 397) of Aboriginal activism that Broome himself celebrates in his book. What is needed is a relativist ethnography that begins with the particularities of grassroots experience and the quirky ways in which these are captured, and which develops broader arguments by weaving together these multiple threads of human experience. Broome's is a well crafted and compassionate history of Aboriginal Victorians, but historians tend to constrain the edginess of particular experiences by overlaying general arguments upon them. This approach overlooks the subaltern spaces in the past that we glimpse, for example, in the wonderful cover illustration of Broome's book in the eyes of young Albert Darby and Alf Stephens as they pose with the spoils from their rabbiting expedition at the Rambahyuck Mission around 1900. |
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Broome's achievement, nonetheless, is to have assembled a meticulous historical overview of the disequilibrium caused in a stable indigenous social system by European intervention. Australia's Prime Minister recently called for Australia's history to be told by reference to the facts. Broome supplies them: from the time Europeans first set foot in south-eastern Australia until 1850, when they fashioned it into the self-governing colony of Victoria, over 80 per cent of the region's Aboriginal population had died. |
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Aboriginal Victorians is divided into four parts: 'Wild Times' (1800–50), 'Transformations' (1850–86), 'Assimilation' (1886–1970), and 'Renaissance' (1970 to the present). Although this structure perhaps imposes Eurocentric frameworks (for example, the timing of Aboriginal resistance, and reference points that echo the institutional history of Aboriginal 'Protection'), and certainly deals at greater length with periods of time during which historical records make Aboriginal Victorians largely faceless and voiceless, it enables Broome to develop a powerful and sustained account of the unrelenting impacts of European settlement upon Aboriginal society and culture. Broome's analysis is subtle and even tempered. He points out that notwithstanding claims of genocide, frontier violence caused far fewer deaths (albeit at a ratio of one to 12, or up to 80 European, and between 800 and 1,000 Aboriginal deaths) than did disease and dispossession in the years to 1850. Broome argues that it was in fact the period 1886–1967 that constituted the most coercive time for Aboriginal people. Broome focuses his analysis of this time period upon the Aboriginal reserves and missions, and the removal of children from their natural families. We need also to investigate further the working and living conditions of those 'half castes' and 'fringe dwellers' who lived outside the institutional world of the reserves and welfare agencies. |
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Broome has written a compassionate general history of Aboriginal Victorians which will influence others to test and extend his arguments. The Aborigines' Friends' Association did not read from Alfred Gore's diary in 1885, but Broome has given us glimpses of Aboriginal lives on the margins of European society and record-keeping which it is within our power to amplify and celebrate. |
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| University of South Australia |
ALAN MAYNE | |
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