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Followed with:
His [Sturt’s] rescuers were aborigines with whom he had made friends farther up the
river. It was not long before Sturt was in the middle of an excited crowd of natives
who wished now to be his friends. His kindness to the natives had brought its own
reward. (Department of Education, 1954/ 1963/1966, p. 114, emphasis added)
The two extracts demonstrate the explorers (encapsulated by Sturt) as acting rationally,
whereas the Indigenous people need to be calmed and actively encouraged by gift giving and
performances to cease being irrational. This legitimises the explorers’ presence on Indigenous
land. Here, an unspoken binary between rational, white explorers and irrational black
Indigenous people is operating, whereby it is the duty of the rational explorer to calm the
irrational Indigenous people, completely ignoring that the explorers were in essence using
land that was not theirs.
6.4.2 Discourses of peaceful interactions.
This discourse, highlighting examples of peaceful interactions between Indigenous
Australians and explorers includes topics such as exchanging of gifts and instances of
assistance provided by Indigenous people to the explorers. Whilst the majority of instances of
interactions between Indigenous Australians and explorers reported in school textbooks
during this era tell of violence, Source 6.10 provides an example of non-violent interactions,
through the gifting of a tomahawk to an Indigenous man by the explorer Sturt when travelling
(not for the first time) down the Murray River.
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