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Article Excerpt
What follows is an annotation of three sections of Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One.
As noted at the start of this chapter, the guerilla warfare thesis advances two explanations of why violence broke out in 1824: the destruction of native game that left the Aborigines to starve, and the alienation of Aborigines From their traditional lands by the expansion of pastoralism. Chapter Four will take up the claims about native game and starvation. Here, let us discuss the second of these reasons, which Henry Reynolds calls the underlying problem of the escalating conflict: the fierce competition over use of, and access to, land. This thesis has a number of flaws.
For a start, its account of the growth of the pastoral economy up to 1824 is grossly exaggerated. Lyndall Ryan claims the year 1820 was crucial for European-Aboriginal relations. By that year, she says, the colonists had already 'effectively depleted' the Oyster Bay and North Midlands tribes, even b though 'the Europeans occupied less than 15 per cent of Van Diemen's Land'. This statement gives the impression that the land alienated at the time approached 15 per cent of the island, whereas in reality it was only a fraction of this. According to Sharon Morgan's detailed study of early land grants, between 1803 and 1820 they amounted to 85,370 acres, which was a mere 0.5 per cent of land in the colony.
In 1823, there were 441,871 acres allocated in 1027 grants, by far the largest area alienated in a single year. In some cases, the grants made that year went to settlers who were already occupying the land concerned, but in other cases the grants were not taken up until years later, and sometimes never. The 1823 grants, however, still brought the total land alienated since 1803 to only 527,241 acres, or 3.1 per cent of the island.
Ryan is also wrong about the size of the individual grants made and their purpose. She says settlers arrived from London with letters recommending they be granted between 400 and 800 hectares, or 990 to 1990 acres, on which they were to grow wool for the textile mills of northern England.
It is commonly agreed that clashes between Aborigines and settlers began to escalate in the 1820s and became ongoing rather than sporadic. The settler population had increased by 600% between 1817-1824, from 2,000 to 12,000, and the economy had grown substantially. The character of conflict in the late 1820s was perceived by settlers as a 'war' and the threat to Aboriginal subsistence is usually taken as the key factor in a change in the nature of conflict.
Morgan in Land Settlement in Early Tasmania does not claim that this figure of total land grants is equivalent to the total amount of land occupation or use by settlers. 'It is fair to say however that in general graziers or their stock and stockmen preceded official settlement by some years.' (Morgan, p. 19).
Windschuttle also omits any mention of the 'ticket of occupation' system, the principal system of land tenure. Tickets of occupation were granted as annual leases. As the surveyor GW Evans noted in 1820, there were 'numerous ... very large tracts comprehending from 3 to 10 miles in extent selected at the will and for the convenience of the parties'. There were 'no limits' to the lands allowed to be occupied. The 3.1% comprises only the land granted in full tenure--a fraction of the land under use by settlers. Windschuttle makes no mention of the ticket of occupation as a distinct form of land use (Boyce in Whitewash, p. 52).
No writers make claims for the growth of the pastoral industry to this date, merely for the expansion of farming--overwhelmingly pasturage--by official and unofficial land use. Ryan notes the takeoff into full pasturage as occurring between 1822 and 1826, rounding off in 1830 (Ryan, p. 4). Robson notes the wool export boom as beginning in 1825 (Robson, p. 260).
Ryan's figures are taken from the Tasmanian Government-produced Arias of Tasmania's section on historical land use--which measures both granted and occupied land (Ryan, p. 79).
In fact, there were also many farmers, herders and kangaroo hunters occupying land who never bothered to regularise their land use with any form of official tenure. David Burn, in A Picture of Van Diemen's Land, first published in 1840-41, notes that crown lands were 'overrun with men free by servitude or ticket of leave'. Bum's memoir, a vital source for early settlement history on the island, is uncited in Windschuttle (Burn quoted by Boyce in Whitewash, p. 54).
Size of land grants varied enormously, both from London and as 'top-ups' to existing settlers. Knopwood, an early diarist, notes the arrival in 1822 of George Meredith with a letter from Downing Street recommending he be granted an additional 2000 acres, due to his provision of capital (Windschuttle has references to Knopwood, but his diaries do not appear in Fabrication's bibliography). Grants in 1819 included those of...
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