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Fractional Identities: the Political Arithmetic of Aboriginal Victorians

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Fractional Identities: the Political Arithmetic of Aboriginal Victorians Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxviii:4 (Spring, 2008), 533–551. FRACTIONAL IDENTITIES Len Smith, Janet McCalman, Ian Anderson, Sandra Smith, Joanne Evans, Gavan McCarthy, and Jane Beer Fractional Identities: The Political Arithmetic of Aboriginal Victorians The debate over the size of the Ab- original population of Australia on the eve of the European inva- sion has been complicated by the nation’s unsavory “history wars.” The smaller the number of original inhabitants, the lower is the implied number of colonial casualties and the more defensible appears the claim that a people of the plough had a right to con- vert a seemingly empty land into a food basket for the empire. However, as scholars have come to understand the complexity of Aboriginal society and its management of plant and animal food resources, they have also gained a new appreciation of the land’s carrying capacity. Indeed, the belated discovery of women’s sig- niªcance as food gatherers has revealed the extent to which Ab- original people were reliant on the gathering of the vegetable and invertebrate food resources to be found in previously unappreci- ated abundance throughout the continent, as well as the extent to which they systematically managed those resources by ªre, aqua- culture, and proto-agriculture. Len Smith has estimated that this Len Smith is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, Australian National University. He is the author of The Aboriginal Population of Australia (Can- berra, 1980); co-editor, with Gordon Briscoe, of The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70 000 Years to the Present (Canberra, 2002). Janet McCalman has a personal chair in the School of Population Health, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Sex and Suffering (Baltimore 1999); co-author, with Ruth Morley and John Carlin, of “Birth Weight and Coronary Heart Disease in a Cohort Born 1857–1900 in Melbourne, Australia,” International Journal of Epidemiology, XXXV (2006), 880– 885. Ian Anderson is Professor of Indigenous Health, and Director of the Centre for Health & Society, University of Melbourne. He is the author of “Aboriginal Society and Health: Critical Issues Demand What from Sociologists?” Annual Review of Health Sociology, X (2002), 5–20; co-author, with B. L. Loff, of “Voices Lost: Indigenous Health and Human Rights in Australia,” Lancet, CCCLXIV (2004), 1281–1282. Sandra Smith is a research ofªcer in Indigenous Cultures, Museum Victoria. Joanne Evans is Deputy Director of the eScholarship Research Centre, University of Mel- bourne. Gavan McCarthy is Director of the eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne. Jane Beer is a research assistant, School of Population Health, University of Mel- bourne. This research in this article was funded by the Australian Research Council and sup- ported by Museum Victoria. The authors thank Nicholas Knight and Kate Naughton for data entry. © 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2008.38.4.533 by guest on 01 October 2021 534 | LEN SMITH ET AL. so-called “terra nullius” would have supported around 1.6 billion human lives past infancy during an estimated 70,000 years of hu- man occupation before British colonization—scarcely an empty land that belonged to no one.1 the colonial decline of the aboriginal population There has been considerable variation in the estimates of the original population of Australia before European colonization. It is said that Arthur Phillip, ªrst British Governor, estimated the popula- tion of the whole continent when it was annexed in 1788 to be around 1 million, although there is now a dispute over whether this estimate was ever made. Later estimates by explorers and gov- ernment ofªcials were based on observations of concentrations of people whose numbers may already have declined because of in- troduced diseases. In 1930, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who reviewed the available literature on settler observations, frontier violence, and introduced disease, determined the original population to be at least 250,000 and possibly in excess of 300,000. Subsequent ar- chaeological research that has rewritten modern understandings of Aboriginal society, ecological practice, and food gathering, now makes an estimate of 1 million in 1788 seem implausibly low for a land mass of such size and resources.2 1 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2003); Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne, 2003); Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. I. Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Pad- dington, U.K., 2002). John Howard, the current Australian Prime Minister, dismissed as “political correct- ness” the description of the European settlement of the Australian continent as an “invasion,” but most Aboriginal people remember it as such. Similarly, the “history wars” have ques- tioned the extent of frontier violence. The conservative historiography prefers to focus on the role of disease and Aboriginal “backwardness” as more signiªcant than frontier violence; other historians would argue that the demographic impact of smallpox subdued indigenous resistance to invasion. The European settlers were sometimes welcomed as visitors, but never embraced as permanent co-habitants; their animals soon monopolized access to water and pas- ture. In Victoria, Aboriginal resistance grew after communities were able to regroup, and the local terrain provided cover for guerrilla-type operations. To argue that settlement was not an invasion is to deny that Aboriginal people had a deep historical claim to collective possession of the land. This dispute underlines the necessity for empirical research into the demographics of the transition from a precolonial to a colonized population. See Richard Broome, Aborigi- nal Victorians: A History since 1800 (Sydney, 2005). John Mulvaney, “‘Difªcult to Found and Opinion’: 1788 Population Estimates,” in Gordon Briscoe and Len Smith (eds.), The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70 000 Years to the Present (Canberra, 2002) 1–8; Smith, “How Many People Had Lived in Australia Before It Was Annexed by the English in 1788?” ibid., 9–15. 2 Broome, Aboriginal Victorians. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2008.38.4.533 by guest on 01 October 2021 FRACTIONAL IDENTITIES | 535 A similar profusion of estimates about the size of the Victo- rian population emerged both in 1788 and in 1835, when the ªrst settlement was established at Port Phillip. Until recently, a consen- sus had developed, based on Radcliffe-Brown’s work, that about 15,000 people occupied the area south of the Murray River before the British occupation. However, that ªgure must be considered an absolute minimum, given the evidence of decline until 1850, summarized by Barwick and others. Since then, the work of Butlin, Webb, and Campbell has re- sulted in a substantial increase in the supposed population. The southeast corner of the Australian continent was probably the most densely populated part of Aboriginal Australia, with suf- ªcient food supplies to support a semi-sedentary society and econ- omy along the Murray River and parts of the western basalt plain. This population was affected by two successive smallpox epidem- ics around 1788 and 1829 that swept across the southeast ahead of the colonial frontier: Curr (1883), Brough Smyth (1876), and nu- merous others reported that the initial epidemic reduced the tribes as far away from Sydney as the Murray estuary by half. Broome ar- gues that the ªgure of 15,000 must refer to the population at the founding of the colony in 1835, and that if each epidemic resulted in 50 percent mortality, the precolonial population must have been about 60,000. Hence, by the time that the colonial capital of Melbourne was formally settled in 1835, the Aboriginal popula- tion had already fallen by 75 percent. Figure 1 portrays our tenta- tive reconstruction of the colonial population decline and its sub- sequent recovery.3 Just eighteen years later, in 1853, ofªcial counts placed 1,907 Aborigines and 6.5 million sheep in Victoria, but the European in- vaders were quickly making up the human deªciency; half a million gold seekers surged into the colony in a decade. Because the entire colony was closely settled, from 1835 onward, the 3 Diane E. Barwick, “Changes in the Aboriginal Population of Victoria, 1863–1966,” in Mulvaney and Jack Golson (eds.), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia (Canberra, 1971), 288–315; Noel G. Butlin, Our Original Aggression (Sydney, 1983); Judith Campbell, In- visible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780–1880 (Melbourne, 2002); Stephen Webb, “Intensiªcation, Population and Social Changes in South-eastern Vic- toria: The Skeletal Evidence,” Aboriginal History, VIII (1984), 154–172; Harry Lourandos, Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian History (New York, 1997); Edward M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Then Called the Port Phillip District (from 1841–1851) (Melbourne, 1965; orig. pub.1883); R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania (Melbourne, 1878); Broome, Aboriginal Victorians. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2008.38.4.533 by guest on 01 October 2021 536 | LEN SMITH ET AL. Fig. 1 The Aboriginal Population of Victoria, 1780–2001 Aborigines were restricted in their movements, and alienated from their hunting and foraging lands. They were subject to high mor- tality, not only from tuberculosis, syphilis, and other diseases, but also from settler violence. Births were few, and the population went into a rapid decline.4 By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, 1.2 million whites and 652 Aborigines, by ofªcial calculation, were in Victo- ria, plus 11 million sheep and 1.6 million cattle: The colonization of Victoria was arguably the most rapid and most catastrophic co- lonial dispossession of the nineteenth century.
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