Tuition Before Rights : Aboriginal Adult Education in Australia 1800-1983

Abstract

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, one could detect an inexorable logic in the development of Aboriginal affairs from the time of the initial conquest of the country until at least the Second World War. The assumption of what Mr Justice Blackburn termed the “legal fiction” of peaceful settlement ofterra nullius(an empty land) nothwithstanding, the entire country was, in the view of its long-term inhabitants, definitely not empty, nor without law and government. (Even the South Australian Colonisation Committee seems to have concurred in this view by assuring intending settlers that they would be protected from hostile savages, in 1834, two yearsbeforeformal settlement.The non-fictional fact of conquest, however, placed at the doors of colonial administrations the responsibility for those conquered remnants who survived the process of settlement. But since theraison d’êtreof settlement required the fiction of empty and available land, the proprietary rights of its owners had to be denied from the first. To this was rapidly added the impropriety of heathen representing themselves or giving evidence in court, since they could not take the oath. Thus, although Walmadjeri and Tanganekald alike were henceforth British subjects and liable in British law, certain of their legal rights had to be postponed until they could understand their full importance – which could take an indefinably long time during which they might die out anyway. Understandably, with British civilisation at the pinnacle of human evolution, ahead of even the French, the German and of course the Hindu civilisations, and Aboriginal barbarism at or even below its base – George Grey surmised that Aboriginal life must represent some animal regression from that of the Garden of Eden – this period of apprenticeship for civilisation was a necessary burden for those with Christian charity to bear (Rowley, 1972:126)