Professor Larissa Behrendt AO, Eualeyai-Kamillaroi, is at the University of Technology Sydney. She contributed a chapter, 'Settlement or invasion? The coloniser's quandary', to The Honest History Book (2017). She is one of Defending Country's distinguished Supporters. The extracts below are from her chapter (pp. 233-34, 236, 238-39) and are used with her permission. She refers to Lieutenant William Dawes, Marines officer, astronomer and engineer, who arrived in 1788 with Phillip's fleet, and Patyegarang, Cammeraygal, who became Dawes' guide and language teacher.
For Indigenous people, this debate about how Australian history deals with the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families was so hotly contested because it goes to the heart of the story Australians tell about their past. It is a struggle between two competing narratives about the way we tell Australian history – do we romanticise our past or do we acknowledge the mistakes we have made? History is not a single story. It is competing narratives, brought to life by different groups whose experiences are diverse and often challenge the dominant story a country seeks to tell itself. There are no absolute truths in history. It is a process, a conversation, a constantly altering story. As Inga Clendinnen reminds us in her book True Stories, ‘To consolidate good history made out of true stories we need time, and peace, and we need the will. We also need to keep in mind that truth is a direction and an aspiration, not a condition’ ...
Dawes offers another way not only of viewing first contacts but also of thinking about what might have been. Australia would still have been colonised, but the colonisers’ relationships with the land and with the Aboriginal people could have been very different had Dawes’ approach of mutual respect and knowledge exchange prevailed. For Dawes, being close to Indigenous people deepened his understanding both of the world around him and of a common humanity. His approach is rarely celebrated, yet it is an alternative that is neither black armband nor white blindfold. He related to the Indigenous people with curiosity, respect and an appreciation of the richness of their knowledge. He tried to grasp their understanding of the world because he knew it would help deepen his own. His was a humanitarian approach that valued Indigenous perspectives, culture and knowledge. It envisaged a very different relationship between Indigenous people and other Australians. Today, it offers a pathway to an Australia that is not ‘us’ and ‘them’ but instead sees Indigenous culture as a central part of Australian culture. It could lead to an inclusive nationalism that celebrates diverse perspectives and experiences. Such an inclusive approach would not only improve relationships with Indigenous people but also improve the way we understand multicultural communities and other marginalised groups, particularly asylum seekers. Within this inclusive nationalism we could acknowledge that there is no one dominant national narrative but many concurrent, competing and conflicting stories that reflect the diverse backgrounds and perspectives within Australian society ...
For Indigenous people, the perennial questions posed by that moment of invasion in 1788 are about the best strategies for surviving it and determining how to assert Indigenous identity, culture and sovereignty as it faces assaults from the dominant culture every day. These continuing, two-and-a-quarter-century old tensions lie beneath policy questions (Closing the Gap, dealing with incarceration, education, domestic violence, drugs and alcohol) and constitutional options (Recognise or Treaty or both). For the rest of Australia, there is the challenge of how the dominant national narrative – the story the nation tells itself – deals with the invasion moment. This question has become bogged down in the emotions of the ‘invasion’ or ‘settled’ debate. The stand-off gets in the way of a more sophisticated, nuanced and inclusive narrative. Unless and until we get that part of the story straight – finally – the other parts matter less.
Surely what William Dawes shows is that there have always been those who – even though the dominant narrative was entrenched – still saw another way. In those places of curiosity and exchange that Dawes explored, there was little room for guilt or shame, just as there was little room for arrogance or an innate sense of cultural superiority. Until we bury the myth that Australia was ‘settled’, we can never become a country where all Australians see Indigenous history and culture as a key part of the nation’s history and culture – and until we do that we will never have found a way to truly share this colonised country.
Picture credit: Sydney Cove, c. 1800; unknown artist, oil on canvas, acquired 1923; ML 443 (State Library of NSW). One of the earliest oil paintings depicting the town of Sydney from what is now East Circular Quay. Dawes Point Battery with British flag flying is on the far right.
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