Oscar Humphries: Why We're Debating 1788 and All That
Oscar Humphries is the editor of the art magazine Apollo. He was the launch editor of The Spectator Australia.
In January 1788, the first fleet of ships carrying British convicts arrived in Botany Bay after an eight-month journey from Portsmouth. No British ship had been back to Terra Australis since Captain James Cook's discovery 18 years beforehand. Parliament had debated founding a penal colony in Australia on the relatively scant evidence provided by Cook and his officers. This was truly uncharted territory and must have felt even more so, in a way that is nowadays impossible to grasp with a 21st-century mindset. Indeed, up until the Australian High Court's famous 1992 decision in Mabo vs Queensland, which recognised the land title of indigenous peoples, the country was legally deemed to have been terra nullius (no man's land) prior to British settlement.
In Robert Hughes's seminal (and revisionist) account of early Australian history, he describes the ship Sirius sailing past Point Solanda (now part of Sydney). Capt John Hunter watches Aborigines on the shore, flourishing their spears and shouting what, according to Hughes, were the first documented words said by a black man to a white man in Australia: "Warra, Warra!" Go away.
If those Sydney-side Aboriginals had had any premonition of what was in store for them and their neighbouring tribes throughout the country, then they would have shouted this until their voices gave out.
The City of Sydney, as reported this week, has voted 7-2 to remove the words "European arrival" from its official documents. Under pressure from an Aboriginal advisory group, Clover Moore, the lord mayor, accepted the proposed substitute "invasion". Yet just as the term "arrival" has polarised Australia – one "arrives" at a dinner party with a box of chocolates; one doesn't "arrive" in a country with warships and diseases to which there is no native immunity – so, too, will the latter. The term "invasion" is a very strong one and already extremely controversial.
It is very hard to sit on Sydney Harbour and say, "This was all a mistake". Visiting Australia as a tourist, it is unlikely that you will get any sense of the plight, both historical and current, of the Aboriginal people. Tragically, given that their population once numbered a million and now stands at less than half that figure, it is possible that you will not even see an indigenous Australian in the manicured and trendy city centre – aside perhaps, from the man in war paint who most days plays the didgeridoo while busking along to a dance-music backing track at Circular Quay, where the ferries depart for the North Shore and Manly Beach.
Should Australia's pride in its economic resilience, extraordinary stage of development, cosmopolitan culture and all-round good luck be clouded with an enduring guilt?..