Hunger and the humanitarian frontier

Abstract

Within a few days of settlers' arrival in Eora country in 1788, disruptions to the ecological balance between population and food supply were set in train. The first conflicts were over fish and the officers soon observed that the local people were 'very hungry'.1 Over the next century and a half as settlement spread across the continent, so too did these disruptions. Their rate and extent was not everywhere the same. Different economic modes and different demographics varied their impacts, and bush food continued to be important. Indeed, recent research shows that in some contexts settlers embraced and depended on Indigenous foodways.2 But while such insights are important in variegating the larger story, disruption to food supplies was one of colonialism's irrefutable consequences. This knowledge has informed the writing of Indigenous historiography since the 1970s. Henry Reynolds' influential The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) saw the European invasion resulting in 'chronic insecurity' in relation to food, and much of his analysis of resistance proceeds from conflict over resources. 3A decade earlier, C. D. Rowley wrote that there was 'a kind of inevitability' in the progression from the 'destruction of native food supply, or of the incentives to hunt and gather it' to rationing. 4 To draw out the significance of food is not to ignore the social and spiritual disruption that came from the land grab but to contribute to ways of understanding it. The 'history wars' raised questions about physical violence in the past but debate was stiflingly constricted to the extent of 'massacres'. 5Hunger was another form of physical violence, more difficult to determine,