Many great thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries looked to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia for answers to core questions about what it meant to be human, as if they were so close to the beginnings of society that their ways of life could reveal its starting point or its very essence. Engels looked to them for the basic forms of property relations; Emile Durkheim and James Frazer for the meaning of religion; Freud for the original human trauma; Kropotkin for original human equality; Malinowski for the fundamental structure of family life.In retrospect, the speculations range from fanciful to fatuous. And the one thing all these theorists have in common is that none ever saw an Aboriginal Australian or set foot in one of their societies. One anthropologist who did spend time with real live Aborigines was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. In 1911, he embarked on research in Australia, working at first with an inland group of Aborigines. This was disrupted by a police attack on the people he was working with. So great was the destruction that Radcliffe-Brown moved to an island where the authorities were imprisoning Aboriginals suspected of suffering from venereal diseases. This was a barren place where the inmates were more or less left to die, if not of diseases then of desperation and malnutrition.
It was here that Radcliffe-Brown did his "field-work". In his fascinating new book, Sven Lindqvist notes that at least no one was able to sneak off to avoid being questioned. In his published work, Radcliffe-Brown failed to explain that his data came from a brutal and compulsory prison, and that the people there came from a wide range of different cultures and language groups.
These glimpses of how European intellectuals responded, and failed to respond, to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia come about halfway into Lindqvist's Terra Nullius. From the early killings of Aborigines as if they were some kind of bizarre irrelevance, to their exploitation for sexual indulgences or cheap labour, to the seizing of children by authorities so half-castes could be raised to be servants - there is a flow of cruelty that runs through Australian history. Lindqvist urges the reader to see it.
His starting point is the hideous notion that Australia, at the time of first colonisation, was terra nullius, the land of no one. This colonist legal myth established that here were millions of acres available for European settlement. The actual owners and occupiers, the people lumped together under the term Aborigines, were not human enough, or present enough, to be someone. So there was no need to work out any deal, either for purchase or compensation. Each group of settlers, each section of the settlement frontier, sorted out its own relationship to any peoples they encountered.
The history of settlement includes a pattern of massacres where groups of Aborigines were surrounded and murdered, often as a reprisal for actual or perceived resistance to settlement. At times, those guilty of organising or carrying out± these killings were identified and even charged - and acquitted - at some rough and ready court. In reality, the settlers' view was that killing Aborigines was an inevitable part of settlement; and part, also, of their inevitable extinction. In an earlier book, Exterminate the Brutes, Lindqvist gave an overview of European murders of so-called primitives; here he takes us to one of the worst cases in point.
The idea of terra nullius is Australia's version of the self-serving racism of European empire. As the United States of the new America emerged, their legal theory set up the idea of manifest destiny - the doctrine that endorsed the inevitable displacement of indigenous tribes by European settlement. In the 17th century, Spanish theorists urged that the "Indians" of newly conquered South America were "natural slaves", and could only gain from actual enslavement by Catholic settlers from Europe. The African slave trade depended on an equivalent, if less articulate, division of humanity into "us" who were real and fully human, and those others who were not. Today, indigenous peoples live with the consequences of the doctrines used to dehumanise and dispossess them.
Lindqvist's new book is also a reflection on guilt and responsibility: many Australians have welcomed the idea that the nation as a whole has to say sorry for what has been done to the Aborigines, while no government in power has allowed any such official apology. He recalls a visit to Norway where, because he was Swedish, he was blamed for Swedish collaboration with Nazi Germany, even though he was a small boy at the time. Were they right to blame him, he asks?
He answers with a simple reflection: those who have benefited from the crimes must live with the burden of guilt. He ends by suggesting that there can be penance and restitution - so that the crimes in Australian history can be given "a new setting and a new significance". However optimistic this sounds, humanity, properly understood, has no alternative if it is to achieve its full moral self.
Terra Nullius
by Sven Lindqvist
translated by Sarah Death
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