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Australian Indigenous Petitions Australian Indigenous Petitions: Emergence and Negotiations of Indigenous Authorship and Writings Chiara Gamboz Dissertation Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of New South Wales School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences October 2012 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT 'l hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the proiect's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.' Signed 5 o/z COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 'l hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or digsertation in whole or part in the Univercity libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertiation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract lntemational (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substrantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have appliedlwill apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertiation.' Signed AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT 'l certiff that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of cqntent has occuned and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they, are the result of the conversion to digital format.' Signed -Z 20/2 Dedicated to Anne and Nathan CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Literature Review 13 1.1. Petitioning as a political resource for representation and negotiation 14 1.2. Indigenous petitions and the humanities in Australia 23 Conclusions 36 Chapter 2. Theoretical Framework and Research Design 37 2.1. A contractarian framework 38 2.1.1. Rousseau on legitimization of power and on freedom: reciprocity and mutual commitments 39 2.1.2. Carole Pateman: the settler contract 45 2.1.3. Charles W. Mills: the domination contract theory 47 2.2. Collecting and analysing petitions 50 2.3. Ethical considerations 54 Conclusions 55 Chapter 3. Contact to Collaboration: Oral petitioning, English literacy and collaboration in writing 57 3.1. Emergence of oral Indigenous petitions in early colonial New South Wales 58 3.2. The development of Indigenous literacy in English 62 3.3. Petitioning the Queen from Van Diemen’s Land: recalling a compact through instances of collaboration 66 3.3.1. Knowledge of petitioning and Collaboration as technical assistance 72 Conclusions 83 Chapter 4. Voices and Expressions: Interrogating the Law, requesting Land and marking a Presence 85 4.1. A petition to the Governor for clemency: white and black laws in early colonial Western Australia 87 4.2. Georgy, Coxen and the Native Police: the petition of Georgy an Aboriginal Native of the District of Darling Downs in the Colony of Queensland 93 4.3. Tommy Dower’s petition for land and fair play 98 4.4. Proclamation Day: Tommy King on behalf of the Aborigines of Albany 108 Conclusions 111 Chapter 5. Behind Text and Signature: Motivations, places and endorsement 115 5.1. Diverse motivations 116 5.2. Places: the penal system 119 5.3. Places: missions and reserves 122 5.3.1. The reserve system in Victoria and New South Wales 124 5.3.2. The Coranderrk petitions 129 5.3.3. Maloga: the two sides of a petition for land 144 Conclusions 160 Chapter 6. Petitions and the Public Sphere: Public venues, commemoration and contemporary discourses 163 6.1. Places: Rural and civic communities 164 6.1.2. Public venues: Petitioning for access to education 168 6.2. Petitions as memorials 183 6.3. Contemporary experiences, perspectives and discourses 192 Conclusions 199 Chapter 7. Appealing to the nation: New forms of Collaboration 201 7.1. Petitions from the late 1920 and protest 203 7.2. William Cooper’s petition to the King, 1933-1937 209 7.3. “Not an ordinary petition”: The Yirrkala Bark Petitions 219 7.3.1. Precedents of assertions of Yolngu cultural and proprietary rights 223 7.3.2. Bridging different scripts and languages, cultures and laws 230 Conclusions 241 Chapter 8. Discussion and Conclusions 249 Conclusions 261 Appendix 265 Bibliography 307 Acknowledgements The realization of this research project has been financially supported by a University International Postgraduate Award (UIPA) scholarship and by funding for archival research kindly provided by UNSW. This project has been supported from the very first day by my supervisor A/Prof. Anne Brewster, whom I would like to thank deeply for always having been there for me during my candidature. She has introduced me to the work of Charles W. Mills, Michael Warner, Catherine Belsey, Andrea McArdle, Robert Ferguson and other scholars and writers, which I found very useful in conceptualising my research. Most of all, I would like to thank her for her warm encouragement, for always making me feel free to discuss my ideas with her and also for her patience and flexibility. I would like to thank also my postgraduate coordinators, Dr Paul Dawson and Dr Michelle Langford: it’s been a pleasure to meet both of them and I’d like to thank Paul in particular for pointing out to me Peter Craven’s review of the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature, published in 2009; it is now part of my literature review chapter. I’d like to thank Penny van Toorn for her pioneering work on Indigenous petitions in Australian literary studies, which inspired me to know more about the genre. I’d like to thank my co-supervisors, A/Prof. Katharine Gelber and A/Prof. Sarah Maddison for their feedback on the first chapters. Dear thanks to Dr Catriona Elder, for her useful editorial comments on the article “Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia: Recovering Inherited Voices and Perspectives”, which is partly based on the research I discuss in Chapter 3 and 6 and is now published in New Voices New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies, edited by Catriona Elder and Keith Moore, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. My gratitude also to Adam Lucas for his feedback on early drafts of several chapters of the thesis, Saliha Belmessous for her comments on part of Chapter 5 from a historical perspective, Hannah Schürholz for assisting me with photocopies at PROV and for a translation from German. I’d like to thank all the staff of the archives I visited, in particular, Tom Reynolds and his colleagues at SROWA; Margaret Reid and Tilly Geary who provided me with a brilliant source analysis at SROQLD; Snr Aboriginal Officer Wilson Andrew and archivist Matthew Gordon Clark at SROSA; the members of the Koori Records Unit at PROV. Many thanks also to the staff of the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. I would like to thank for their time Dr Wayne Atkinson and Tom Trevorrow, Ngarrinjeri Heritage Committee, for discussing with me the 1881 petition for land from Maloga, and the commemoration of the 1923 petition written by Ellen Kropinyeri, respectively. I’d like to thank also my friends, Renee and Mitch for coming over to bring me food, wash my dishes and be so wonderful during my last week prior to submission; Kim for helping out with the appendix; Nathan for the printing, Jeni Ryde & Bruno Di Biase for the support, and all those whose affection has accompanied me in these last four years and made it a special time. Last, but not the least, special thanks to Margaret O’Shea and the Dean of Graduate Research School Prof Laura Poole Warren who logistically helped me to start and finish the research project. Introduction When colonial legislation and early settlers introduced petitions and the right to petition in Australia, they ushered into the country a “political instrument” or “a form of political action” which, by then, had been used widely across the world.1 Petitions, which can be individual or collective and which exist in different forms, some conforming to standard formal models, others closer in form to letters, are characterized by an earnest request. This request is usually inscribed in a narrative which explains and justifies the request itself. This narrative often records fragments of lived experiences and portrays the individual or collective views of the petitioners. This trait of petitions assumes a particular importance in circumstances where there is an absence or paucity of other sources which record and represent these views. The views of Indigenous people in Australia, especially in the first periods of contact with non-Indigenous people, were mostly refracted or represented, in the written form, in records left by non-Indigenous people which often suffered from authorial inferences and interpretations. Once English literacy and the command of English spread among Indigenous people so did the knowledge of written forms of communication between people and the authorities.
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