Aboriginal Victorians by Richard Broome

I have just finished Richard Broome’s Aboriginal Victorians – A History Since 1800. (2005, 467pp)
I have known Richard since we went through Uni together in the 1960s and it is always great to catch up with him and Marg when they holiday at nearby Mooloolaba at Christmas. This Christmas just gone he generously gave me a copy of his latest history work for which he had just won the NSW Premier’s Prize for History.
My first sense is awe at the meticulous research and recording of so much detail in the story of Aboriginal Victorians over the last 200 years. As Richard says in the Preface it is a book that took about 15 years to produce!
Of all the observations in this history the one that has biggest impact for me is that there were in Victoria ‘perhaps 60,000 (Aborigines) before Europeans and their diseases arrived’ around 1800. And the evidence is that Aborigines had inhabited Victoria for 30,000 years! This population had plunged to about 500 in the 1920s. Unbelievable!! Richard chronicles the interaction between black and white in Melbourne and the many regions of Victoria. Disease, alcoholism, pastoral exploitation, bureaucratic regulation and inquiries ad nauseum, all get comprehensive coverage in the story of decline. The writing was well and truly on the wall in the first 50 years of white settlement because ‘Europeans were deemed ‘progressive’ and Aborigines ‘primitive’: a circular and self-fulfilling justification for Aboriginal decline. Colonists argued that Aborigines were inferior simply because they were inferior.’
The role of alcohol is especially disturbing. Richard tells us that analysis of annual reports for the 1860s ‘found that those locked-up for drunkenness and resisting arrest made up 76 percent of all Aboriginal convictions.’ It is easy to despair when in early 2007 prominent Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson shouts from the rooftops that alcohol is still the scourge of many Aboriginal communities. But many areas of Aboriginal life in the 1800s and early 20th century that Richard covers still have a sad resonance today. After recounting an episode in 1941where an Aboriginal man, Norman Clarke, resisted arrest, was batoned into submission by Constable De Vere, and slipped in the police cell breaking his jaw, Richard observes Clarke ‘joined a long line of Aboriginal people who had ‘fallen’ in police stations.’ Right now in 2007 a Queensland policeman, Sergeant Hurley, is awaiting trial over the death of an Aborigine, Mulrinji, in a police cell on Palm Island. Apparently he ‘fell’, sustaining fatal injuries!
Of course there are aspects of Aboriginal life for which European settlement is not responsible. Richard touches on cannibalism. The area of child abuse, domestic violence and rape is stated to be complex and related to a range of experiences and conditions that Aboriginal people have endured. Geoff Clark, the former ATSIC chairman, recently found guilty of rape, seems somehow to symbolize the enormity of the challenges that still confront Australia and the place of its indigenous people. The recent book, Bad Dreaming by Louis Nowra, puts the spotlight on the sore on the Australian cultural, political and social landscape that is Aboriginal domestic violence and child abuse. When considered against Richard Broome’s valuable work it makes me realize that although we have come so far, we still have a long way to go.