Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
immoral people who had no concept of property (Williams, 1986). The Europeans saw the seemingly
wandering and homeless tribes as not being aware of the value of land they walked upon. Such a view
allowed the Europeans to justify the appropriation of Aboriginal lands (Attwood, 1996).
There was no respect for the existing Aboriginal law and culture: “We must starve them off to get rid of
them - they are a squalid dirty lot” (Elder, 1988:54). Elder cites opinions of many non-Aboriginal
people: “The best thing that can be done is to shoot all the blacks and manure the ground with their
carcasses” (William Cox, Landowner, 1824 as cited in Elder, 1988:42). “I look at blacks as a set of
monkeys, and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better” (cited in Elder,
1988:9). Those who resisted British domination were killed as being “nothing better than dogs, and …
it was no more harm to shoot them than it would be to shoot a dog when he barked at you” (Reverend
William Yate, 1835 as cited in Elder, 1988:9).
The non-Aboriginal people represented the attitude of domination over nature: “Consciousness is human,
and involves reason. A serious gap exists between us and the rest of nature. Nature is to be watched,
pitied, and taken care of if it behaves” (Bly, 1980:8). Aborigines, like the wildlife, were bracketed in the
category of worthless species: “it will be a happy day for Western Australia and Australia at large when
the natives and the kangaroo disappear” (Whitelock, 1985:43-44), as one member of the Western
Australian legislative assembly said in 1892. In only 200 years of settlement, this contemptuous attitude
for the land and its Indigenous people, coupled with the genocidal tendencies of the invaders, generated
a profound change in the social, cultural and physical landscape of the Aboriginal world. Then came
the missionaries who, as Tatz admits, were:
[A]ctive agents of various governmental policies, such as protection-segregation,
assimilation, so-called integration and some of the latter-day notions like selfdetermination
and self-management. More than agents, they were delegated an
astonishing array of unchallengeable powers. Uniquely - in terms of modern missionary
activity in colonized societies - mission boards became the sole civil authority in their
domains. They ran schools, infirmaries, farms and gardens, provided water, sewerage
and similar public utility services, established dormitories, built jails, prosecuted
“wrongdoers”, jailed them, counselled them, controlled their incomes, forbade their
customs and acted as sole legal guardians of every adult and every child. Almost
incidentally, they also tried to Christianize the inmates according to their varying dogmas
and doctrines, with little success (1999:18-19).
As Tatz says, for non-Aboriginal Australians today:
[G]enocide connotes either the bulldozed corpses at Belsen or the serried rows of
Cambodian skulls, the panga-wielding Hutu in pursuit of Tutsi victims or the ethnic
cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. As Australians see it, patently we cannot be connected
to, or with, the stereotypes of Swastika-wearing SS psychopaths, or crazed black tribal
Africans. Apart from Australia’s physical killing era, there are doubtless differences
between what these perpetrators did and what we did in assimilating people and removing
their children (1999:2).
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