I am very interested in learning about Indigenous/Aboriginal Australia before and during colonialism. If anyone is well read on this, I have some specific questions:
- What were the naming trends for Indigenous Australians before colonialism?
- Did Indigenous Australians have to change their names to European names during colonialism?
- Were Indigenous Australians enslaved or used as servants to colonist families?
- What did general European/Indigenous Australian relations look like during this time?
Many thanks in advance!! Any help at all or pointers welcome.
I mostly agree with what amp1212 has written, but I would focus on your question of slavery and domestic service - yes, this was absolutely the case. It was a widespread belief in British culture that poor people were lazy and immoral, and one always led to the other, whereas the wealthy and prosperous had become so through ingenuity, virtuousness and industriousness. Convicts were transported to Australia not just to build empire for the wealthy on the cheap, but to rehabilitate them of their laziness and sin through labour. Even prisons in Britain were designed to reflect this, with useless labour devices meant to busy people.
Many British invaders viewed Indigenous Australian life much the same way. When missionaries and pasturalists came to a new area, one of the first things they would do is push the tribes-people to work on church grounds, as cattlemen or as domestic servants. The idea was that they would see the inherent superiority of European culture and be reformed through wealth, God and labour, but the reality was that they experienced the harshness of the capitalist system for the first time.
On top of forced labour, missions and pasturalists dispossessed the traditional owners, stealing or letting their cattle foul the precious water supplies, clearing trees, fencing off yam fields, shooting all of the native animals, introducing pests, isolating or destroying sacred sites. Disease also wreaked havoc, meaning the pasturalist need not fire a bullet to wipe out a generation of children, a cohort of elders, the neighbouring tribe that traded you precious resources, every strong leader and diplomat, or capable gatherers - whoever survived the disease would likely starve or die of thirst. To stave this off, the refugees of the tribe would beg and steal (which were not seen as immoral to them) or work for meagre rations, which were often so lacking in nutrition that it made them more sick and killed them quicker.
Unlike convicts, who could be treated quite well, had decent rights, could make themselves rich and were generally let off their sentence early for good behaviour, there was no end to being an Aboriginal person. The more often a tribe would walk off the land and abandon their forced labour, to return to what traditional life they could reassemble, the more they would be accused of being lazy and worthless. Another point is that convict labour was concentrated in the cities and ended fairly quickly, meaning the cheap labour now had to come from somewhere new. Having few white women or labourers out on the frontier, rich pasturalists would raid Indigenous tribes for workers and bed-warmers - women were an especially prominent cause for grief, with their rape, abuse and abandonment upon pregnancy often leading to war. Much of Indigenous Australia has mixed ancestry, and this is often used against them by racists, so it can be a sore point. Pasturalists often welcomed this, as it brought them the support of the authorities, who would then either quietly or openly support massacres and other abuses.
War was often quick, one-sided and provoked. In the early days of NSW, from 1788 to the 1830s, warfare was generally the British soldiers and civilians heading out and not catching anybody, while the tribesmen hunted or maimed livestock, raiding isolated farm houses, and fought in a frightening yet futile economic guerrilla style. When the British caught a tribe, they often slaughtered all they saw - convicts were especially callous and trigger happy, and often punished by the authorities for needless murder of suspiciously isolated women (but never hanged for it). On the other side, Indigenous warriors preferred to follow tribal justice, killing a random member of the white 'tribe', even if they were not the true transgressor - this led to the British thinking of it as pure murder. During this period, the warriors might have been far more successful, despite the superiority of the British in open combat, if it were not for the havoc wrought by disease and inter-tribal warfare caused by fear of curses.
British tactics evolved with the import of new weapons and horses. The warriors could no longer outrun or evade soldier-civilian hunting parties, and rifles and shotguns were deadlier, faster to reload and more accurate. Tribes that had been 'conquered' had men willing to work for food or other benefits against their former tribal enemies, being recruited as trackers of Native Police. This was especially the case in Queensland, which more than any other state experienced traditional war, with by far the largest numbers killed in actual battle.
WA and Qld had the most brutal frontiers, in their northern regions, where colonists settled later due to the difficulty they had with climate and disease. Unlike the southern capital cities, which attracted plenty of working class labourers and middle-class settlers, the north was dominated by wealthy squatters keen on building that wealth and connection and gaining legitimate hold over stolen lands through it. In the Pilbara and Kimberley areas of the northern WA, this often meant rounding up and shipping away 'dissidents' to Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, which despite its modern Instagram famous idyllicism was then infamous as a hellish prison island, where the men soon died of disease in packed cells, far from home (and in their culture, their souls lost). This is where images like this (NSFW) come from, with entire tribes shipped off on trumped up charges, often by police and judges in the squatters' pockets. The surviving men and women then had little choice but to come work with cattle, or as abused laundry women or domestic servants, or in the very dangerous but profitable Broome pearling industry.
This treatment was backed by legislation, which differed by states and was worse again in WA and Qld. In WA, the 1905 Aborigines Act is particularly infamous - it denied practically every right an Indigenous person could have, including the right to wages, the right to leave a work place, the right to disobey, the right to marry freely and many more. To gain Australian citizenship, an Indigenous person would need to totally abandon their family and culture, which was too much for most - it led to Anne Frank like situations, hiding granny in secret walls when the police came by. At the same time, the children of Indigenous women and white squatter men were being stolen by the police or sold by their white fathers to missions and reservations, where more of the same forced labour awaited. The difference here was that slavery was a secondary goal to total assimilation - aka genocide - by removing the coming generations of 'half-caste' children who they believed white enough to learn simple labour from white society. The "full bloods" were believed to be dying out anyway, so stealing the children was a means of both saving the 'Aboriginal race' and destroying it. This is now known as the Stolen Generations, which didn't end until the 1970s (many argue it continues today through state-sanctioned juvenile detention and confiscation from unfit parents) and had serious traumatic effects on most of Indigenous Australia, especially in the longest settled areas in the south.
The era of forced labour ended once the federal government pushed through laws that demanded Indigenous workers be paid (a pittance). You could argue that this was done for appearance sake, as the international community had become quite critical of Australia's racist policies across the board, or you could argue that it was done to make the left-wing unionists happy - at the time they tended to be quite racist, jealously attacking non-white workers - by making Indigenous labour less desirable. Either way, the Indigenous labourers, many of whom had built up new identities as proud stockmen (cowboys, essentially), found themselves with nowhere to go. Whereas before they had shelter, food, purpose and a means of continuing life on their land, they now found themselves totally unwelcome. Around the same time, the restrictive laws were eased up, and freedoms given, including the right to vote. The symbolic end of this era is the 1967 referendum, which was to change the constitution to allow for it to count Indigenous people in the census, and also legislate laws for them, yet by the white community it was seen as a symbolic acceptance of Indigenous people into Australian society. It occurred at the same time as a massive ramp up in civil rights demonstrations akin to those in the US, like Freedom Rides where city folk would head out to rural towns that featured heavy segregation and stir up trouble.
Many of the Indigenous people now released from forced labour by the churches, reservations and pastoralists migrated to the cities for work. Centuries of trauma and racism followed them in, with terrible social housing on the outskirts, mass unemployment and lack of education, severe health issues including easily preventable disease (even in children, causing blindness and deafness), drug and alcohol problems, and police brutality and over-policing. Prisons became the unwanted cultural hubs that missions had been in the past, to the point where Fremantle Prison has incredible painted murals done by prisoner artists trained on missions.
Aboriginal Australians had been living in Australia for something like 65,000 years (archaeological evidence) or forever (their own creation stories). Australia was their universe and over that immense span of time they'd evolved a tremendous number of languages and customs, quite different from place to place. So when you say "naming trends for Indigenous Australians" -- how someone might be named in Ngukurr (Northern Territory) vs Manjimup (Western Australia) or Tasmania, vastly different. And how someone might have been named 1000 vs 2500 vs 5000 vs 10,000 years ago-- unknowable, but you can assume that languages and names changed over time, because they do everywhere. Since they weren't written down, we don't have a lot to go on other than trying to reconstruct vocabularies from multiple Australian languages- many of whose speakers were dead before word and name lists were recorded.
There were complex kinship systems, colloquially called "skins", one of the ways by which people were identified, but not one single system, and again what you might find in one place very different from another-- Australia is big, and people separated by thousands of miles over tens of thousands of years had vastly different languages-- perhaps 800 of them at the time of first contact with the west.
Aboriginal Australians were given Christian names by missionaries, or less formally western nicknames by settlers. So, for example, in the 1840s when Edmund Kennedy was exploring Cape York, his Wonnarua aboriginal guide whose own name was Galmahra, but was referred to as "Jackey Jackey" (today regarded as a pejorative, somewhere between "Stepin Fetchit" or "Uncle Tom" in racial awkwardness).
Aboriginal/European relations mostly looked like other "Fourth World"/First World encounters. Disease, murder, alcohol, cultural dislocation, physical dislocation all ravaged the aboriginal population-- you'll get a spirited argument as to whether it was an intentional genocide or an accidental one, but what is undeniable is that the government declared Australia "Terra Nullius" -- an empty country, with no property rights held by indigenous peoples.
This was a very different status than, say, the United States Constitution afforded native Americans; notwithstanding the general lack of interest of the US government in abiding by the treaties it signed, native American nations were recognized as sovereigns from the beginning, quite different from Australia. Similarly, if you compare to New Zealand where the Treaty of Waitangi establishes the sovereign rights of the Maori, there's precisely zero rights for Aboriginal Australians, who are effectively wards of the state, not unlike orphan children.
One of the disciplinary challenges of writing Australian "history" -- is that history is about documentary evidence, and the indigenous population didn't have a written language. So Australian "history" is the story of the settlers, who write; you have to look to anthropology and archaeology to learn the aboriginal story, because they didn't leave many historical documents.
Further Reading:
Two books to read side by side, describing the same time and place from very different viewpoints:
Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia - A good look at just how the legal seizure of Australia worked, and the rationales behind it.
Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 - Tasmania is a more digestible topic than the Australian continent, and the place where the destruction of the Aboriginal population was complete. For a good narrative of just how this process proceeded, Rachel Standfield's book is a good place to start.
Jacky Jacky and the politics of Aboriginal testimony - Jackey Jackey/Galmahra leaves us the only 19th century aboriginal account of dealings with European explorers that I'm aware of; his story is not surprisingly a sad one, and the legacy awkward, but he's a good place to start when you try to get a handle on how Europeans interacted with aborginal Australians; compare with, say, Sacajawea.
Indigenous Australian Languages
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia - important book on the ecological interaction of the indigenous population with the land. While Europeans arrived in Australia (and indeed in North America) and saw "state of nature" -- what they were actually looking at was the product of tens of thousands of years of human interaction; not so obvious as western landscape architecture, but nonetheless a purposefully "managed" landscape.
