Alongside the development of a sense of identity and belonging that connected the identity of settler Australians to their new environment, there grew a sense of identity and belonging that relied on social-cultural demands and imperatives. If a nation were to be developed from the colonies, then settler Australians must form a united political community. What is clear is that there is not only a socio-cultural imperative for the invention of collective subjectivities, but also a political advantage to their acceptance. Nationalism is as much a means of separation from others as it is an assertion of a distinct identity and culture for oneself.
For settler Australians, identity and belonging to country does not only come from assuming a connection with the land based on their presence in and engagement with the landscape; rather, national identity for settler Australians required their differentiation from other collectives, that which they left behind and that which they encountered in their new country. As Smith, the prominent theorist of national identity, suggests, if a truly autochthonous white Australian identity could be imagined it would have to be based upon both occupation of land and a distinctive culture and race.
The need for the colonial settler population to establish a stable and secure sense of identity and belonging in its new homeland was evident from the earliest period of colonisation. This need to establish a collective identity as Australians was particularly highlighted in the decades preceding Federation which occurred in 1901. Both racial and
71 For a more comprehensive look at both these national characters see Richard Nile ed., The Australian
Legend and its Discontents (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000). For a critique of Ward’s thesis see the collection of essays published in Historical Studies, Vol. 18, 1978.
cultural elements played a role in determining what national identity would be asserted and protected in legislation. Political philosopher Geoffrey Stokes suggests that at Federation the national identity promoted and protected in legislation was tripartite, characterised by three essential features—white-ness, British-ness and Australian-ness. The security and autonomy of the nation was given as a rationale for maintaining this model of homogeneity.72
Scientific racism provided, at that time, justifications for white superiority. According to this doctrine, white-ness guaranteed the physical, intellectual and moral stamina required to civilise and protect the continent. Those of British stock deemed themselves to exemplify white qualities. However, in relation to Australian-ness, British- ness also occupied a position of ambivalence. Although there were those who spoke of colonial degradation, nationalist native-born settlers conceived of themselves as having improved upon their British counterparts. Colonial experience, they argued, had highlighted and intensified positive non-indigenous attributes.73
As a consequence, the perception developed that settler Australians were ‘not only white, but whiter than white; the best people in the world at being white’.74
One of the first Acts passed by the new Federal Government in 1901 was the
Immigration Restriction Act—an Act designed ‘to place certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants’. Although this act was the first of many which over time would constitute the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’, its aims were not significantly different from that of previous colonial legislation. Policies endorsing the eviction and alienation of the ethnic other had also been popular and successful for much of the written history of Australia up until that time. The removal of non-white immigrants began in the mid- nineteenth century when the Chinese were evicted from the goldfields. Later the diligence of the kanakas was rewarded by their deportation from the far-northern cane fields. These policies were all designed to promote and protect white homogeneity and
72 Geoffrey Stokes ed., The Politics of Identity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997): 121-123.
73 D. Cole, ‘The Crimson Thread of Kinship: Ethnic Ideas in Australia 1870-1914’, Historical Studies 14.56
(1971): 518-522.
the sense of fraternity and belonging that such a collective identity was perceived as securing. 75
From the 1890s to the 1950s, although the expression ‘White Australia Policy’ was not in official use in Australia. Nevertheless an ethos of racially restrictive immigration was enshrined in public policy and retained almost unanimous public support (, as in The United States, Canada and New Zealand).76
Government policy effectively excluded non- British immigration until the 1940s. It took until the early 1970s for the ‘racist’ White Australia Policy to be officially replaced by the allegedly ‘non-racist’ agenda of multiculturalism. This policy promised much in terms of reversing the xenophobic trend and promoting diversity as integral to Australian national identity, something that to date had been absent from the Australian agenda.
It hasn’t only been the alien from without that white Australia has sought historically to proscribe, but the alien from within. It is notable that for the first 200 years of European settlement in Australia the absence of Aborigines in discourses on Australian identity politics was routine.77
Nor were Aboriginal Australians considered important figures. The role of Aboriginal Australians was undervalued until the 1970s. In the 1940s and 1950s there was little or no mention of Aboriginal people in Australian national history, or in books on Australian society and identity. This too was the time of ‘the great Australian silence’ described by W.E.H. Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lecture of that title. Indeed, one of the most prominent studies of Australia in the sixties, Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country78
, a book promoted as setting the guidelines for debates about the Australian way of life, devotes less than half a dozen pages in total to discussion of Aboriginal issues. In order that the British establish in perpetuity a ‘home’ on this
75 See also Miriam Dixson, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity, 1788 to the Present
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999); and Gillian Lea Whitlock & David Carter, Images of Australia: An Introductory Reader in Australian Studies (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992).
76 For a history and comprehensive analysis of the white Australia policy see James Jupp & Maria Kabala,
The Politics of Australian Immigration (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service,1993)
77 Up until the 1970s there also remained a profound ignorance about the roles that women played in
Australian history. For seminal works that brought the important role of women in Australian history to light see Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: the Colonisation of Women in Australia
(Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1975) and Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788 to 1975 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
78 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: The Classic Study of Australia in the Sixties (Harmondsworth:
continent the indigenous race had first to be displaced. The seizure of Aboriginal homelands created spaces promptly filled by a settler presence. As the settler group wrote the indigenes out, they wrote themselves into the land. 79
When it came to the subject of nation-building people felt comfortable with the out-of-sight, out-of-mind status of Aboriginal people. Indeed, some historians still do. 80
When Captain James Cook claimed the Australian continent for Britain in 1770, it is thought that the indigenous population may have numbered 300,000 in as many as 500 groups, speaking many different languages and each group with its own distinct territory and socio-political structure. 81
Nevertheless, popular notions of 'colonial' Australia were of a mono-cultural society rather than a society constituted by a plurality of racial or cultural groups. Just as it took more than 150 years before the permanent residence of other peoples 'of colour' would be officially welcomed in Australia it was a similar length of time before Aborigines were acknowledged as Australian citizens.
Despite the fact that Aborigines have historically been excluded from authorised colonial versions of the production of Australian national identity, their absence belies their influence. As Edward Said proposed in his seminal text Orientalism (1978) 82
(and has now come to be widely accepted), a culture, a self, a national identity, is always produced in relation to its ‘others’. The development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another different and competing alter-ego. In terms of the constitution of a settler identity, Bain Attwood puts it this way:
Nationality is forged only by reference to an other, which it also constructs. ‘Australians’ for example, are constructed in the process of constructing the Aboriginal (or Asian, British, American etc.) other. More particularly, each category is imagined in terms of characteristics which are deemed to be the opposite of the other, and those (heterogeneous) characteristics of
79 Paul Carter expresses this idea in the following way. He holds that ‘white invasion was a form of spatial
writing that erased the earlier meaning. Settlement then became a question of giving back to a desolated, because depopulated, land a lost significance.’ See Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York:Knopf,1988): 165.
80 In recent times, the debate among Australian historians concerning how the process of colonization (and
the role and influence of Aboriginal peoples in the process) has re-ignited. See, for example, Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002) andStuart Macintyre & Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, Vic.: University of Melbourne Press, 2003).
81 Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994): 11. 82 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
‘Australians’ which are not recognized and accepted are displaced and projected onto the (Aboriginal) other, thus excluding, repressing and denying their presence within the Australians. In this process there is obviously an interdependence of the two categories—‘the Australian’ only has meaning in relation to the (Aboriginal) other. This other, while secondary and subordinate, is nonetheless central, then, to the existence of the primary and superordinate category of Australians.83
As is common to most experiences of European colonial expansion, from very first contact, the indigenous peoples of Australia became objects from which non-indigenes were necessarily differentiated. The characteristics by which the Aboriginal other is distinguished become constituting factors in the self-image of the non-indigenous subject. It is the perceived differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’ that many believe have defined ‘our’ national identity.
The establishment of a penal colony on the Australian continent had its origins in the socio-economic and demographic changes occurring in England in the late-eighteenth century attributed to the first stage of the Industrial Revolution. This period produced a long series of depressing social results for the working class—urban slums and massive unemployment as well as brutal working conditions and very low wages for those who were employed. Social disruption and high rates of crime resulted. The transportation of the criminal poor to new colonies in Australia provided an urgently needed solution to social chaos.
However, expediency alone did not, and according to law could not, solely provide adequate justification for the founding of the Australian colony. Adequate justification had to be found in, or written into, international law. At the time of first settlement, according to understandings of international law, as interpreted by de Vattel, Europeans were entirely justified to establish colonies for their own surplus populations in lands that were only sparsely populated by indigenous peoples. Indeed, given the Divine command to subdue the earth, they had not only a legal, but also a moral duty to do so.84
This was deemed particularly salient in cases where the indigenes were also hunter-gatherers.
83 Bain Attwood ed., The Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia (St Leonards, NSW: Allen &
Unwin, 1996): xxiii.
The addendum is significant not only for pragmatic reasons—because it would supposedly be easier to dispossess a more sparsely spread indigenous population—but in terms of providing a solid ideological rationale for dispossession. It is inherent in the doctrine of terra nullius (discussed previously as a support for the annexation of the Australian continent) that both the land and any peoples that inhabited it, be in a ‘state of nature’. It is the condition that the Aboriginal population was judged as such, and that the settler group judged themselves at counterpoint, that silently informed settler perceptions of Aborigines, notions about themselves and their right to belong, and set the scene for what followed in profound ways.
Early-colonial perceptions of Australia’s Aboriginal hunter-gatherer population were distributed between two stereotypes—the ignoble savage and the noble savage. The former, Broome claims, was most prevalent among the uneducated majority and the latter among the elite, educated minority.85
The origin of these two conceptions of Aborigines can be found in the thought of influential political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, particularly Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their work, and differing evaluations of what characteristics are present in a so-called ‘state of nature’ are also intimately bound to both terra nullius justifications for the dispossession of Aboriginal people and conceptions of socio-cultural superiority on the part of European colonisers.
The philosophers mentioned above are typical Enlightenment thinkers—very much part of that movement in Western history and philosophy that placed great emphasis on human rationality and will. One of the questions that their work and thought addresses is governance; why if human beings have both reason and free-will ought they submit themselves to the control of others? The logic of these philosophers’ response involved the postulation of a ‘state of nature’—a state in which humankind lived prior to the advent of civil society.
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had an exceptionally negative view of the state of nature. Humans live in relative isolation, engaged in very basic activities to meet their survival, and at times coming into conflict with other human beings who are also after the same natural resource to aid their survival. Since every person is effectively in
competition with every other person for limited resources, life is almost inevitably violent. Here, the only limitation to freedom is power. Hobbes’ famous statement is that in the state of nature, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’86
. In the state of nature, there is no society, and so there exists no sovereignty, no system of governance, no laws and no civil rights. Hobbes must also share some responsibility for images of Aborigines as ‘ignoble savages’. His ideas certainly contributed to eighteenth-century theories that tried to link human beings and animals in a chain of being and to find the ‘missing link’.
The fore-most English philosopher of the period, John Locke, adds at least one more important feature to those supposedly inherent to Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’. In this state, according to Locke, there is not only a lack of social or political authority or organisation, but all goods are held in common. The right to property is earned by bestowing one’s labour on it. For Locke, it is the act of human beings labouring (farming and building) that the land itself can be enclosed from the commons and become the property of individual persons or peoples.87
According to this understanding hunter- gatherers had no capacity to own land, and therefore the land they occupy is free for the taking.
The description of ‘natural man’ posited by the work of French philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau, credited as being the first of the Romantics, turned chain-of-being theory on its head. Rousseau has a rather different conception of “nature” to the nasty, brutish and short existence depicted by Hobbes. Rather than being a brute or beast, for Rousseau, Man in the state of nature is nothing more than someone who possesses all the baseline attributes that allow him or her to be defined as human. Into this category he did not put intelligence or civilisation or culture. Rather, for Rousseau what natural Man possessed was equality, freedom, health and happiness; human beings are by nature good, and are corrupted and depraved by society. Indeed in the closing paragraph of Part I of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) he makes a direct comparison between the characteristics of ‘primitive’ populations and the inequality, misery and slavery of
86 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 87 John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, ed. with an intro and apparatus criticus Peter Laslett
modern Europe. According to this analysis, the history of humankind can be understood not in terms of an evolution, but rather a devolution of the noble savage.
As can be seen in the work of the philosophers mentioned above, the notion of the ‘savage’ is closely connected in conception to that of the ‘primitive’. ‘Modern’ humankind has consistently sought to find its place in its differentiation from the ‘primitive’, understand the baffling complexity of its existence in juxtaposition to ‘simple’ societies and justify its projection into the future by tracking its trajectory into the past. Historically, the greater percentage of both social and ‘psychological’ anthropology can be read most accurately as studies in primitivism—efforts to map the qualities of chronologically earlier cultures onto contemporary civilisation. In terms of the non-indigenous quest to locate its other, Aboriginal Australia definitely provided early ‘scientists’ with a large body of data with which to come to conclusions. Much of it has served to re-enforce the propositions put forward by earlier social and political philosophy.
After their initial ‘discovery’ by the west, Aboriginal peoples were assigned their position as symbols of pure antiquity—noble but ‘in-themselves’ inutile. Aboriginal culture ‘in-itself’, if it was recognised as ‘culture’ at all, was assigned little value except as a reference point from which mainstream society could keep an appropriate distance— physically, psychologically and culturally. However, in order to concretise the ground between the non-indigenous population and its Aboriginal other, the category of Aboriginal or Aboriginality had to be firmly established.
As previously discussed, from the very beginning of white settlement the categorisation of Aborigines as primordial or primitive assisted in the processes of annexation of land and colonisation. Later-nineteenth-century western scientific ideas of biology and anthropology re-enforced colonial perceptions of Aborigines as representing an homogenous class of primitive people determined by their simplicity and lack of intelligence to be ill-suited to the more advanced and complex modern world of the Europeans.88
It did not take long before ‘Aboriginal’ was read as ‘inferior’ and Euro-
88 For a comprehensive analysis of anthropological constructions of Aborigines see Bain Attwood & John