There is a lot wrong with the version of Australian history we are teaching in our school systems. For a start, Captain Cook did not "discover " Australia. The Dutch were here a long time before Cook's first voyage and in fact Abel Tasman sailed around the coast of Tasmania in 1642 and named two landmarks after his ships Haemskerch and Zeehaen. A version of those names applies today to two Tasmanian west coast towns.
Britain sent Cook on his voyage of discovery to chart this great southern land mass because they had a problem. Having lost their American colonies in the war of independence they could not dispose of England's prison population to this " new world ". The American colonies had developed a rich farming culture and was desperately short of labour. Britain had been selling those sentenced to prison to these settlers - who had the right to their free labour for the duration of their sentence in exchange for paying their voyage fee and feeding and clothing them. The Americans choose to remove this record of their "convict "history from the official record books.
There was no established economy in Australia when Cook arrived and the British were forced to create a penal colony from scratch. Nobody asked the indigenous people for permission and so from the British point of view Australia was "settled "and from the indigenous it was "invaded "- and both were probably right, according to the viewpoint of those times.
This white settlement moved from Botany Bay to Port Jackson and struggled with famine in its early years. The treatment of convicts was harsh by design because the British hoped to instill fear in the minds of England's criminals. "Transportation " was deliberately enhanced as the ultimate punishment in the hope that it would decrease crime. That came unstuck when gold was discovered at Ballarat and Bendigo - and Australia became the land where fortunes could be made.
By a strange quirk of fate the settlement of the Australian land mass was not contested by other nations. Unlike Africa - where explorers planted their country's flag and carved out sovereign territories the rest of the world seemed preoccupied. The Frenchman La Perouse arrived with two ships at the same time as the first fleet, but he continued on to the north and was destroyed in a cyclone. The outbreak of the French revolution closed that chapter of French expansion.
The Dutch were occupying what is now Indonesia and they may have investigated northern Australia, but the spice trade was their main interest and there is no evidence of their presence other than several shipwrecks on the west coast. As a result, Australia is unique as the only continental land mass under a single unified government.
We are now regarded as one of the rich countries of the world and should we throw open our door our population would quickly double and treble, but this "Lucky Country " has not spread it's bounty evenly. Many of it's original inhabitants are struggling to fit in to a world of commerce that conflicts with their traditional way of life.
This seems to be common in other lands where a foreign culture intruded. Many of the indigenous people have integrated and prospered in the Australian culture that had developed over the years and yet others have been left behind, stranded in a way of life that has vanished and unable to connect to a changed world they do not understand.
Slowly, a need of consensus is emerging. This is not a problem that will be solved in a generation, nor will the understanding of the soul of Australia be fully understood by those to whom the "Dreamtime " is merely a myth. The hope is that integration may happen in such a way that indigenous culture becomes a part of the Australian experience that it is instantly as recogniseable as the accent and outlook that distinguishes us on the world scene.
It seems that Australia's history was written from the view of early colonizers. Perhaps now is a time for a rewrite by those with a clearer view of how this country came into being !
No comments:
Post a Comment