Gellibrand and the Tasmanian Newspaper

Gellibrand and the Tasmanian Newspaper[1] ~ see Appendix III


The attitude of ‘The Tasmanian’, after Gellibrand was editor continued the theme of justice and human rights as the interest of all classes including the aborigines.[2] It was edited by Gellibrand’s close associate, Robert Lathrop Murray. Its weekly tone may be presumed to give us insight and understanding to the mentality which was in circulation between these men and their readership. I extract this piece on the aborigines from The Tasmanian of October 1831 as cited in all its original emphasis:

“Taking then these men, as so being, (Note: Men! and not animals!) the case stands thus; - that we, the English, have invaded their country, of which they were, at the time of our invasion , in rightful possession - with the best of all possible titles, that of THE ALMIGHTY, by whom they were placed here. It bears not the shape of argument, to talk of the low place in the scale of human civilisation” which these men occupy. That word is, after all, of somewhat difficult definition. It is differently understood, even in what are supposed to be the most “civilised” nations of the world, those of Europe. [3]

This lookout was at radical odds with the monochrome notion of British law as Arthur or Bourke practiced it in these far-flung colonies. The global experience of the great circle route of their voyaging was a spiritual venturing towards the hoped-for land of new foundations, and the fact of the antipodean nature of their horizons, had turned many minds about, into some embrace of a sense of the planetary whole. The aboriginal cultural frontier becomes something of the coalface as the local subplot of the wider global-embrace of the world’s peoples. This mentality of change from a mere British outlook has its origin in the religious aspect of a particular and pilgrim-journeying Christian subculture within England and America. I mean that ‘travelling’ spirit in the Christian missionary, anti-slavery, socio-political movements, partly represented in England by Exetor Hall, but in the wider sphere by many public men in politics, law and society, [e.g.: Lord Glenelg, J. Stephens] which, by the 1820s and 30s had turned their attention to the rights of native peoples. Gellibrand came from that world-embracing English climate of mind to be part of a particular VDL moral micro-climate, and, one quite different to the then predominant attitude ruling there. He was coming as it were from a spiritual-climate already committed to border-crossings, in moral intellectual outlooks that broached the social/geographical divides in outworking a practical social Christianity in pursuit of Encounters with otherness, that is also a coalface for the Encounter of God - the universal One among all others.

We need to see what ‘belief’ here means in its religious context. Historical, as anthropological theory, as Geertz says, must attack questions of belief. Historical religious ‘beliefs’ are key in the causality of historic motivation. ‘We have been trying to stage Hamlet without the Prince for quite long enough.’[4] If socio-religious aspects of a motive Christianity is not recognized, then the Treaty of Dutagalla will be seen (as it has been) in either a reductionist analysis - as an illegal or farcical bad letter of the law; or else stereotyped - as a real estate swindle by mere avaricious and greedy men.[5] Compare Gellibrand with men of more usual frontier stamp; Stephens, Aitken, Swanston, Hepburn, Franks, Fawkner. They all, as if somewhat monochrome creatures of their class and race, exclude Buckley or Aborigines from their 'society'. But with Gellibrand the monochrome takes on the dimensionality evinced by shadow and depth, even if he, in his frontier nobility, or his Company profile under his lead, are varying in its levels of embrace. The historical interest in the treaty, the focus in its details and diversities, by both its storytellers and its detractors, of all generations since the treaty was made, should alert us to the light it sparks in the human crystal. It brings alien sides together with a sense of romance in the encounter, [6] and of the life-or-death adventure of the border-crossing. Otherwise it sparks anger: -if interpreted as an injustice, it sparks the sense of indignity, of burning at being cheated. It is a frontier in ‘the frontier’ and as such, a ‘playing with fire’. Yet, it is also a candle of faith or hope when set among the more pedestrian documents of the usual grinding monochrome with terra-nullius in the footings. It radically broke with the English conceit: terra nullius! and was unilaterally revoked.

Bonwick[7] identifies in an intuitive sense, with underbedded spiritual motive in Batman's doings. He presents him as qualified hero, unfortunately gilding the lily into a sort of whitewash hagiography. If we ask why a man of Bonwick’s normal objectivity was induced to render the man too perfect, then questions of religious sympathies and beliefs may be inquisited.[8] Bonwick was also a motive Christian of activist and encounterist persuasion. Maybe Bonwick writes this way of Batman, more from a sense of his own outlook of religious hope -against hope, which is engendered by this import of the treaty: - to a making of goodwill in the first principles of the Port Phillip foundations - than from an accurate treatment of what seems to be the loveable sinner part of the well-known charm of Batman, - maybe too ready in his acceptance of aboriginal diplomacy in the bedding of women, as he had charmed many other women, resulting in his early death of syphilis. But this disease came in with Europeans. Casual springs are bedded beneath Batman’s casual beds. The motive Christianity of these men did not perfect the motive sinner. Christianity understands that this is done by Christ in the perfect tense of an open-souled response to God. Batman is no exception. Yet he was truly remarkable for his charming goodwill in making the border-crossing of huge historical and cultural divides. Batman was a cross-cultural "native', an ‘otherist’ by long practice and circumstance, carnal and sacred in both of his respects. The two exist at the same time, sprung in paradox. Like human campaigners fighting spiritually in the moral chaos of embattled earthy grounds so that the kingdom of heaven might gain ground, step by step, each chosen one is caught between their present and future. Old Samson is flawed, he may retreat, and often fails. Many a flaw is a fatal one. But, then how can that fatality or flaw be anything like the whole spiritual campaign of the human story? Especially seen from a hermeneutic of religion that is about the culturing of history itself ?

Any history presented as Hamlet without the so-so Prince fails us. It cheats us of the key issue. I wonder if the cheap wit of cynics and reducers have their fruit in the indignity which Aboriginal reactions show in their feeling of having been cheated on their treaty ground? More a reaction to the legacy of written history than it is to the likely machinations of the actual happenings on plains of tributaries north of the Yarra. Big outdoor sculptural ‘tombstones’, inscribed to treaty ‘mirrors, scissors, flour, beads, axes, etc’ at the new Victorian museum, like the spread sculptural ‘hand-heap’ of these same items, fanning down from a real thing to plaster casts that shatter at the base, in deliberately shattered glass-cases inside the museum,[9] go very well to point out the inadequacy of those things. Especially in the revoked treaty on the European side. But they do no justice, neither do they mention the ongong ‘Tribute’ clause of the treaty, and the ongoing willingness of the European treaty makers to honour this tribute[10], nor to the reality of aboriginal anticipation,[11] or their post-settlement party to the peace, deciding this historic choice in active agency.[12] To see the eight aboriginal men, whom history has also judged as being men of at least some high degree, as having being cheated in their encounter is to render them quite inept. Indeed, to render them as naive or primitive, stupid, without proper understanding of what they were doing. Sniping history has failed their Aboriginal goodwill.

The treaty now needs to be seen, not just in dismissive stereotyping nor by petty reductionism, and so, less for the details of its economic, or its literal-minded legal particulars, - than for its wider scope as a major act of proto-reconciliation; for its cross-cultural and border-crossing beginnings, for its face-to-face dealings with otherness, its shifting out of the polar insularity of monochrome culture in the ‘Australian Quest’, a turbulent shifting towards ‘identity’, as a process of communicating towards understanding and embrace.

So Gellibrand/Batman & Co. have great interest in the frontier disquiet, wanting change, with a need to cross the borders of otherness, for more understanding, in entreaty towards a conciliar policy of meeting to human agreement. The treaty-making example of William Penn was promulgated as ideological currency within the editorial legacy of Gellibrand in The Tasmanian even in 1831, a good four years before the PPA Treaty of 1835!

“Many of our readers will recollect the beautiful engraving of William Penn signing the treaty with the American Aborigines, by which that splendid territory, now Pennsylvania, was ceded to him.... And we apprehend it will not be argued, even by the most polished arguer in favour of civilisation ascendancy, that the American Aborigines ever possessed any greater rights, either natural or acquired, than do the Aborigines of this island”.[13]

So, we presume, later, of mainland Australian Aborigines. If this engraving was so much in currency that the editor could refer to it as being well-known! then this picture of Penn with the Indians, takes on Iconic significance[14] as the embodiment in conception of a possible agreement! the embrace of change in goodwill as agreed between disparate peoples! Even this is dismissed by cynics as a pipedream, the fact that it has currency in the journal linked with Gellibrand and his associates leaves us to a deduction: that treaty was on his heart and mind.

The Parchments of Treaty and other Parchments
The criticism of the parchments of treaty by rival journalists, legal and political commentators; and the rejection of them by Goveror Bourke in Sydney should be put in to the nexus of the rival mentalités in the historical perspective. The Treaty of Dutigalla came out of the thoughtful context of many years of rebuffed hope and the spiritual dissatisfactions among Gellibrand and Associates both in respect to the treatment of men, whether aborigines or felons, and of land tenure. The rejection had in some sense been anticipated, and the fact that the treaty documents were conveyed directly to England meant that Gellibrand was attempting to go over the heads of the party spirits under narrow rules in the letter-of-the-law minded and petty literalism of the hard-hearted, bleak-souled prison colonies. This context, most pertinently, includes Gellibrand’s own early rejection of the Crown Grants of Land in VDL. As far previous as 1831, at the biggest public Meeting then to be held in the VDL colony, addressing the King on his accession to the throne, Gellibrand said:
“When I was interrupted[15] I was about to address you on the subject of land tenure... Can a greater grievance be imagined than the last six years, no title has been given to one single grant of land... Is it not a grievous evil that all the parchments which have hitherto been issued, are of doubtful validity. Perhaps it is the better way to state the plain fact, that they are utterly worthless, and not worth the parchment on which they are written.”[16]
The subsequent historical interest in the actual parchments of the treaty of Dutigalla, even after, and though, they were rejected, has been a strong force, [and one, I suggest: of the romance, the thrill of otherness, and of the transcultural mystery tasted in the fruit of this cross-cultural coup], and in every generation since! even in the cynical historians and detractors! speaks of the truth of a human interest in these beginnings, far greater than the ordinary worth or worthlessness of any land tenure parchments of more commonplace legality.


[1] Gellibrand was to take an active part in the renewed Press attacks upon Arthur’s government, as editor of The Tasmanian, a newspaper, which began its career in March, 1827 Forsyth, W.D. 1935 p.183

[2] The Tasmanian Edition of June 3 1836: ‘we have already drawn the attention of people to the injustice of subjecting the Aborigines of these Colonies to laws, of which they are...in the most perfect ignorance’

[3] The Tasmanian Oct. 1 1831. Murray goes on: “Many proceedings which on the Continent are considered to be mere matters of course, shock the “civilisation” of the “more refined” British. The “civilisation” of the tartar hordes of northern Asiatic Russia, is little more concordant with ours, than is that of the Tasmanian Aborigines; who, perhaps, on their side, consider us to be as much “Savages” (and perhaps with as much reason) as we consider them to be, in reference to ourselves. Thus, then, on every principle of international law, as such is to be found in every writer thereupon, ... these people are the legitimate possessors of the territory of this land, of which we are merely piratical invades, having waged war upon them, which is bottomed solely upon that miserable word EXPEDIENCY.” pp 309

[4] Geertz ~ ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ in The Interpretation of Cultures pp 109

[5] ‘Batman and his associates had not based their claim on the legality of the two agreements and on the right of the Aborigines to alienate land. At best it had been a tawdry gesture to handful of Aborigines at Port Phillip, a device whose real purpose was to facilitate the acquisition of vast tracts of land from the crown on terms more favourable than the current upset price of land. Reece 1974

[6] Mulvaney; D.J. 1989 Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606-1983 ‘Encounters between Aboriginal groups and settlers were not always hostile. p.xiv / ‘National Estate... Register - contact sites, these places which symbolise or exemplify interaction between Aborigines and other races. These latter places are the focus of this series of episodes in cross-cultural relations.’ p.xvii

[7] Bonwick, James John Batman; The Founder of Melbourne

[8] I use this word ironically. Batmans death by syphilis was seen by Melbourne’s self-righteous Fawkner party as enough to condemn him to the stake of obscurity - to Fawkner’s advantage as the founder! The judgmental idea of Inquisition has long been part of a morally-monochrome party-spirit in Australia’s banal one-nation ambition. Gellibrand himself writes: ‘It is a lamentable fact, that, so bitter is the feeling engendered by Party Spirit, amongst the few, that it recesses private life, and exhibiting, whenever opportunity offers, the most determined hostility and hatred. We hoped that the Inquisitorial Spirit which was imported into this Colony in 1825, had passed away; and that, living in a British Colony, and protected by British Laws, some thing like a British Spirit would have been manifested, even amongst political adversaries. But, when an individual, whose “influence” is his constant boast, but whose “confidence” is asserted to be his chief recommendation, DARES to threaten, in reference to those whom he chuses to designate as opposers of the Government, but who are in fact, only opposed to the dangerous, the injudicious measures, which, it is well understood, he wishes to introduce - when, we say, such an individual dares to threaten To “PUT DOWN!!!” we are almost induced to believe, that, although we hear the English language, we may be exposed to Foreign operations! It is very well known in this Colony, what is meant by “putting out of the way” - whether “ putting down” is at all analogous we leave to the conscience of the pure individuals to determine. It is difficult, for men of ordinary habits, to adopt all the necessary precautions, when such threats are not only made, but may be put into practice. It is, thank God, little suited to English manners or English principles; but the “putters down” may rest assured, that their movement are not unknown. We had hopes that the past would have satisfied, but we recollect that “ the leopard cannot change his spots” and the words of Haman, with a little variation, might apply: “All this availeth me nothing , so long as Mordecai sits at the king’s gate.”
~ in The Tasmanian May 27 1827 quoting the Old Testament Biblical book of Esther. ~ This is said of Alfred Stephens, who, ‘mad’ with professional ambition, was jealous of Gellibrand, and used his big Bureaucrat uncle to advance himself by nepotism, flattering Arthur’s ear with relentless hostile attacks, and so was the key instrument in getting Gellibrand sacked as the Attorney General of VDL, a chair Stephens afterwards obtained, until pervasive unpopularity unseated him .‘No person aquainted with the circumstances attending that case - ever ventured to exonerate Mr. Stephens from the part he took in that transaction, and the lamented Mr. Gellibrand , to the day of his death, knew well the quarter from whence all the bitter attacks, and which deprived him of his lucrative situation, proceeded from.’ The Tasmanian 1839 p.397

[9] the new Melbourne Museum ~ as visited in Sept. 2001

[10]Gellibrand, ‘I was surprised to find this old man had not a blanket and I enquired the cause and was much concerned to learn that no blanket had been given him because he did not leave that part of the country and proceed to Dutigalla for it.” p.20 Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip, Bride. For all his good intention, this is also a misunderstanding as to questions of the man’s free/will to move (trespass).

[11] The death of Franks and his man Hindes (alias Flinders) is put down to a share expectation of tribute, being delivered, instead, with “little blue pills for the natives’, that is, musket shot. see Bride- Cannon.

[12] Wolski, Nathan. Brushing Against The Grain Thesis. ‘The black soil inside, however, that is, inside our shared history, inside the stories of colonisation, inside the story of the development of the Australian nation state, or expressed more generally, inside political time, has been largely ignored by prehistory archaeology as well.. p.409 ...archaeologists in Australia can contribute to the reinscription of Aboriginal people as active subjects of history. Archaeologists working in Australia can pursue an active engagement with the contact period and do their part for a nation seeking reconciliation. p. 413

[13] Robert Lathrop Murray ~ Ed. The Tasmanian Oct. 1 1831pp 309

[14] And, an American (USA) connection, [also Christian] with the founding of Victoria.

[15] By his public enemy and legal nemesis Solicitor-General Mr. Alfred Stephen which resulted a public howl. “... upon Mr Steven again rising , a strong feeling of disapprobation was exhibited. Mr Stephen however continued speaking, but all we could collect was (much hissing and other noise prevailing) that he would not be put down. This ... only called forth an increased expression of the public opinion.” Later: “Mr Gellibrand’s address was received with great applause.’ The Tasmanian May 28 1831

[16] The Tasmanian, May 28 1831 pp 164