By David Day, 2001
How
does a state acquire proprietorship over a territory, especially if there are
people living there already? David Day makes the case that this has been the
central political issue in Australia’s history, and it is a question that
underlies many contemporary and historical national struggles, from the wars in
Palestine and Bosnia to Aboriginal demands in Canada today.
Day’s history reveals many facts of Australian history that I was
unaware of, starting with the fact that Europeans searched for it for centuries
before Cook confirmed its existence as a continent in the 1770s. It seems
astonishing that with sailing expeditions from the 1400s, and occasional
contact, that it should take so long, but explorers rarely ventured far into the
vast and dangerous southern seas. Having made the discovery, they saw little profit
in establishing a remote sea port. The main interest of Europeans was to keep
their rivals from benefitting, disregarding the fact that the land was already
occupied. Hence the decision to deport convicts to establish a colonial
presence.
But one small colony cannot establish a right of proprietorship over a
continent. Day lays out the principles of ownership by discovery, conquest,
occupancy or moral right, and says that Britain and Australia have gone through
all of these in their claims to be lawful owners of the continent. Often these
have come into conflict. The 200-year campaign to extend European occupancy,
which still exists mainly in a few concentrated areas around the periphery,
conflicts with Aboriginal ownership. Australian policies have denied Aboriginal
moral rights by saying that Aboriginal people had no recognized property and were
a degenerate, declining population anyway. Settlers reinforced this by driving
them off their lands, often violently and sometimes through deliberate massacre
as late as the middle of the twentieth century.
By portraying European and especially British cultures as superior, Britain
and Australia attempted to justify the moral claim to ownership. To strengthen this
claim, Australia tightly restricted immigration, particularly from Asian and southern
European countries until the end of the second world war. This was critical to
prevent nearby Asians from establishing an occupancy claim to parts of the
continent where they had long had trading contacts and small settlements. Australia’s
restrictive immigration policy, however, conflicted with the need to populate
and occupy vast territories, so much of its foreign policy was designed to encourage
British, northern European and white American immigration.
This overt racism broke down in the face of the need to expand
population by the mid-twentieth century, when the shifting interests of both
Britain and the USA turned away from the remote, expensive and unproductive
colony that no longer fit geopolitical priorities. Needing to attract more
foreign investment to support industrial development in a new economy, racial
discrimination became harder to justify, and Australian policies shifted. A new
economic boom after WWII was financed by growing Asian countries and their
desirable markets, so Australia now identifies as an Asian country. In keeping
with this more liberal approach is a growing acceptance of multiculturalism. Ironically,
a new identification with Aboriginal history and peoples is now used to support
a continued claim to proprietorship in the face of new interest by China, Japan
and Indonesia. Conceding actual rights to land through a treaty with Aboriginal
peoples has proven difficult, however, and a new White Australia movement is
pushing the Conservative Party to anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal
policies.
Day tells a history of Australia that is soundly researched and
academically based, but interesting and readable. While the focus is on
government policy and personalities, he fills it in with descriptions of the living
conditions, women’s and workers’ movements, and with the story of Aboriginal
resistance to colonialism. The book is well written and insightful, and leads
to a more critical view of our own Canadian colonialism, where we have used
similar themes in justifying the Franco-British presence and protecting it
against territorial Americans.
