Rosendo Salvado and the Australian Aboriginal World Published by © CONSELLO DA CULTURA GALEGA, 2016 Pazo de Raxoi · 2º andar · Praza do Obradoiro 15705 · Santiago de Compostela T 981 957 202 · F 981 957 205 [email protected] www.consellodacultura.gal Translation and linguistic review Cristina Río López Begoña Tajes Marcote Cover image Vista de Nova Nursia, 1860 / View of New Norcia, 1860 Layout Lugami Artes Gráficas Doi:10.17075/rsmaa.2016.en RAMÓN MÁIZ TIFFANY SHELLAM EDITORS Rosendo Salvado and the Australian Aboriginal World actas Presentation 6 he Council for Galician Culture has been promoting different activities around the figure of Rosendo Salvado for more than a decade. Our aim is to rescue the immense work of this illustrious Galician man who settled in Australia and to shed some light on a man of his time, who was against his time but also well above Tof the time when he lived. An individual who carried out pioneering work that established a dialogue with a particular place in faraway Oceania in which he tried to find a synthesis between the Western civilisation he carried with him and a different, allegedly inferior Aboriginal culture he found upon his arrival in Australia. Rosendo Salvado was not, however, very well-known in Galicia. But from 1999 his figure was gradually integrated into Galician culture thanks to several exhibitions, conferences and publications that showed the special dimensions of his personality, marked by cultural pluralism that was innovative for his day. He demonstrated a spirit of understanding of different cultures, of the relationships between the Western world and the Aboriginal world, which he discovered from 1845 on, after his first trip to New Norcia. The exhibition organised then travelled to Australia too, which helped us make the links between the two homelands of the illustrious Tui native even tighter. Salvado erected in Australia a Benedictine community that was built on an atypical civilisatory plan, one that began with something as close to us as names. Salvado encouraged Aborigines to take Christian baptismal names, while keeping their Indigenous surnames, as initial forms of address. But he also demonstrated a rare interest in education, against the incomprehension Rome repeatedly showed. This strategy of Salvado’s resulted in the creation of a 7 number of schools and, above all, in the teaching of trades to Aborigines: ‘Properly instructed the aboriginal acquires a just idea of both the value of money and property,’ as he wrote in one of his many manuscripts. In the particular way in which he saw colonialism, he set up a pioneering rural bank that would grant credit for Aborigines’ farms; he also paid them wages in exchange for their work. To Salvado, to have Aboriginal men working without recompense would make them feel the burden of civilisation without its advantages. And these were some of the recipes for his success. In the following pages, readers will be able to find out about an individual concerned about the rights of Aborigines, on whom he left a deep mark. But they will also find a description of the vast legacy that lies in the New Norcia Community in the shape of maps, diaries, letters, account books, employment records and others – private materials that reveal a great deal about his sensitivity to draw a community to a place where nobody had before. The fact that he was a Galician, of Celtic origin, with pre-Christian traditions that live on in a world of spirits and superstitions and are closely linked to the land, may have helped him relate so well to a highly spiritual community that has preserved his memory until this day. The most substantial part of Rosendo Salvado’s legacy has been compiled and studied in this book. Its contents are the result of the painstaking work of professors Ramón Máiz and Tiffany Shellam, who coordinated a congress that brought a number of outstanding individuals from the Antipodes, such as Susan Ballyn or Peter Hocking, or Giulio Cipollone, Antonio Linage Conde or María Jesús Lorenzo Modia from places closer to home. Thanks to these studies and the exhibition that toured Galicia in 2014, the figure of Rosendo Salvado has much more pluralistic and complex traits today than that stereotyped image according to which his importance boiled down to his alleged role in the dissemination of eucalyptus in Galicia. Also in this case, we should draw the best guidelines for our times from the biography of Salvado himself: tolerance and understanding of others, without renouncing one’s own identity. 8 The activities focused on Rosendo Salvado that the Council for Galician Culture promoted in 2014 could be carried out thanks to the efforts of different members of the Plenary Board (Ramón Máiz, Francisco Díaz-Fierros, Segundo Pérez) and the staff of our institution, as well as external support from very different bodies: the Bishopric of Tui, the Archbishopric of Santiago de Compostela, the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and, in particular, the Australian Embassy in Spain, whose incumbent at that time was Ms Jane Hardy. To all these people and institutions, many thanks for their help. 9 10 Table of contents actas 11 6 PRESENTATION 13 Rosendo Salvado and the Aboriginal World: reading aboriginal autonomy in the light of a pioneer’s legacy Ramón Máiz and Tiffany Shellam 25 Searching for Rosendo Salvado in 1978 Doireann MacDermott 31 Salvado: a man of and before his time Ronald M. Berndt 43 Recovering the memory of Rosendo Salvado in Galicia Francisco Díaz-Fierros Viqueira 51 Rosendo Salvado: a Benedictine odyssey in the Antipodes Antonio Linage Conde 81 Salvado’s archives: a unique legacy Peter Hocking 97 Power in conflict with the essence of peoples Susan Ballyn 111 Bishop Rosendo Salvado’s vision of Aboriginal mission work in the Victoria Plains of the colony of Western Australia Anna Haebich 135 Salvado and the Indigenous Australian: of the same human race. Equality and dignity ante litteram Giulio Cipollone 155 ‘On my ground’: Indigenous farmers at New Norcia 1860s-1900s Tiffany Shellam 179 Civilisation and culture in Rosendo Salvado Ramón Máiz 203 Literary and cultural voyages between Galicia and Australia María Jesús Lorenzo Modia 223 Rosendo Salvado and us Aborigines Paul Willaway 12 ROSENDO SALVADO AND THE ABORIGINAL WORLD: READING ABORIGINAL AUTONOMY IN THE LIGHT OF A PIONEER'S LEGACY Ramón Máiz University of Santiago de Compostela Tiffany Shellam Deakin University Doi:10.17075/rsmaa.2016.en.001 13 14 The commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Rosendo Salvado’s birth (Tui, 1 March 1814) is a timely occasion to delve into a key aspect of his life and work, one that is, in fact, the keystone of all of his extraordinary career: his indigenist thinking and practice. His commitment to the Aboriginal world involved the radical rejection of the brutal ethnocentric, racist approach that was customary in the time of the British Empire, i.e., the approach whereby the Aborigines were considered miserable ‘soulless’ bodies, the remnants of a ‘doomed race’ (the doomed race theory), or even beings belonging to the same species ‘as orangutans’. The emphasis laid on the extraordinary dimension of his missionary efforts, or a misguided focus on his legendary importation of eucalyptus to Galicia, have concealed the very core of his life project – his formidable efforts to promote the personal and political autonomy of Australian Aborigines as human beings with rights and, therefore, with a civil future. Salvado carried out this task displaying, at all times, an openly belligerent attitude against the discourses and practices that both Protestantism and Catholicism had established, and his ways were far removed from those of ‘evangelists of empire’. One only needs to compare his open, unprejudiced attitude of dialogue with the strongly traditionalist, narrow- minded approach of the man who had been his partner in the order and in misfortune in Australian lands from their time in the Monastery of San Martiño Pinario in Compostela, José Serra. In Salvado’s own words, ‘In Australia, the Europeans absorb all of missionaries’ minds, all of their time, all of their means, and the poor savages remain entirely abandoned and forgotten […]. Everything, absolutely everything is done for the Europeans; nothing, absolutely nothing for the savages’ (Salvado, 1883: 432). The recent publication of the Galician edition of Salvado’s memoirs, Memorias históricas sobre a Australia e particularmente sobre a Misión Beneditina de Nova Nursia e os usos e costumes dos australianos (Salvado, 2014), will perhaps lead us Galicians to adopt a more suitable approach and pay closer attention to 15 Ramón Máiz / Tiffany Shellam his exceptional career as we still wait for fresh discoveries resulting from the ongoing transcription of his Diaries, handwritten by the men in charge of the New Norcia Archives. It is particularly striking to see how Salvado himself was lucidly aware that, drawing on his exhausting experiences and his daily reflexion in the inclement environment of the bush, he was developing some ideas and principles of his own, which were innovative at that time, ultimately heterodox, always against the tide of the dominant vision. These were the foundations of the original ‘Salvado method’, the ‘New Norcia exception’ that such an extraordinary woman – a nurse, statistician, outstanding feminist, pioneer of the defence of public health – as Florence Nightingale in the metropolis was insightful enough to unveil. Her astonishment at the answers given by the abbot of the wilderness to her survey on the health of the Aborigines of the Empire was the first recognition of the fact that there, in Western Australia, a Galician friar was challenging the racist practices of the Empire (Nightingale, 1863; Ride, 2007: 198; Shellam, 2012a). Aware of the new approach he was developing through hard learning in the field, Salvado went beyond mere practical, improvised, vaguely humanitarian knowledge in his contact with the Aboriginal world.