The announcement last week of an impending Royal Tour provokes many considerations. Both international and domestic developments need to be taken into account. The global reconsideration of the legacy of centuries of European imperialism, of slavery, indigenous dispossession and economic exploitation represents the latest manifestation of the long process of de-colonisation. As a consequence Britain, along with much of the West, is losing both intellectual hegemony and moral authority. They will be hard to retrieve.
Revisionist historians are rewriting the history of the British Empire with a forensic vigour rarely seen before. The legacy of slavery is under critical interrogation in both Britain itself and in the erstwhile colonies. Respected institutions like the National Trust, the Anglican Church and venerable universities are being called to account for their historic involvement in the trade. The monarchy itself has come under fire. Britain’s erstwhile West Indian colonies are demanding reparation for the slave trade and acceptance of the fact that it was a major factor in Britain’s long story of Imperial domination. The hostile reception which met the recent tour of the West Indies by the young royals in March 2022 was a warning sign that old ways were out of joint with the emerging rise of the Global South. The old colonial deference has passed its use-by date.
Given the parochialism of the Australian media few of these developments have been reported here. But we have been dealing with our own local problems bequeathed by the British Empire. They were thrust to the forefront by the Voice Referendum and the intense national debate which accompanied it. At its heart was the question of First Nation’s sovereignty. In the Uluru Statement of 2017 the indigenous leaders attempted to resolve the matter by asserting that their ancient sovereignty had survived and could co-exist with the sovereignty of the Crown. But Australian Courts are still the prisoners of the original British assertion that the Australians were too primitive to exercise any form of dominion over the continent and that as a result Britain gained an original rather than a derived sovereignty. There were no treaties of the sort common in North America because the Aborigines had nothing to bring to the negotiating table. They had no laws or customs that could be respected or even recognised. It was an extraordinary claim of a kind that had never been made in Britain’s American colonies in the century before the annexation of Australia or in New Zealand 52 years after 1788 when the Treaty of Waitangi was negotiated as a prelude to formal colonisation. Australia’s High Court has adopted what, to many people, appears the extraordinary doctrine that they are unable to even discuss what was the result of the assertion of the Crown’s paramount authority. We are, as a consequence, still shackled to decisions made by a handful of British officials in 1786 who, had never seen Australia and knew almost nothing about it or the million or so indigenous people who had been living there for many thousands of years. The Referendum conserved the status-quo. The question of competing sovereignty remains unresolved.
Sovereignty was only part of Britain’s twin- barrelled terra-nullius .Property was the second target. When the British annexed eastern Australia in 1788 and then the rest of the continent in 1824 and 1829, they made the truly astonishing claim that all the land, all 7,680,000 square kilometres of it, became, on the instant of annexation, the property of the Crown. Once again nothing of the sort had happened in North America. It was an audacious and unprecedented land grab. The land was, quite literally stolen, and eventually the Australian colonies became the receivers of stolen property. It was not until the Mabo Case in 1992 that the law was overturned. What a windfall it was for Britain! All those vast open grassland prepared by centuries of indigenous land management creating bountiful hunting grounds proved to be ideal as sheep walks. The British cotton industry rose to prominence on the back of slave labour. The wool industry flourished as a result of land taken from the First Nations many of whom were murdered in the process. Of those who survived many became members of a pool of cheap labour, their traditional way of life radically disrupted. It’s quite clear that the high death rate was predetermined by the original decision to totally disregard indigenous property rights. One followed the other as predictably as night follows day. Terra-Nullius was, in effect, a collective death sentence.
In all the assorted Royal Tours in living memory there has never been a formal apology to our First Nations. Never been an acceptance of responsibility for policies which were premised on the idea that in 1788 Australia was a ‘tract of territory practically unoccupied without settled inhabitants’ as the law lords in the Privy Council declared in 1889. There has been no public expression of regret or even embarrassment about such egregious, death dealing behaviour. The Palace’s legal advisers almost certainly urge that any reference to the past be carefully crafted to avoid any intimation of legal culpability.
With their inimitable deference Australian leaders have presumably failed to ask for some appropriate response to the horrors in our history or even to politely suggest that such a declaration would be appreciated. It seems extremely unlikely that anything of the sort has been done in relation to the forthcoming tour. Out of national self- respect it should have been made a condition of the whole exercise. As with so many of those countries who are still dealing with the aftermath of slavery it is now time to begin talking about reparations in recognition of all the benefits that the British extracted from their far flung Empire and the ubiquitous violence which accompanied the pillage. At its very simplest we should expect that the British admit and shoulder moral responsibility for the great tragedy that continues to shadow our history.
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian and a Patron of Defending Country. This article originally appeared on Pearls and Irritations under the title 'Another royal tour: should we expect a formal apology to our First Nations?' and is republished here by permission.
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