Wasn’t that a Seinfeld episode?
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There’s some problems with this telegram. For one, the telegram was sent to Henry Prinsep, who was at the time the Chief Protector of Aborigines in WA. Prinsep was a known humanitarian who actively worked to improve the welfare of Aborigines. Prinsep was well-known for taking his duty to protect Aborigines very seriously and for trying, without much success, to get additional resources/funding so that he could do so. In other words, we should be wondering why anyone would send such a request for arsenic for poisoning Aborigines to a person who could be guaranteed to (a) not send any arsenic; and (b) refer the matter to the police. The most probable answer is that the telegram was a hoax, what we today would refer to as trolling. The sender of the telegram would have to be seriously deluded to actually expect to receive arsenic in response to the telegram. It is also entirely possible that the sender’s real name wasn’t Charles Morgan and that the sender was hoping to get the real Charles Morgan in trouble with the authorities. Oh and that story about Aborigines being originally classified as animals - it’s a myth.
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We need to take a leaf out of the Kiwis’ book.
Watched a debate last night; the question was, is racism destroying the ‘Australian dream’?
IIRC,
Before: for - 54%, undecided - 20%, against - 26%.
After: for - 64%, undecided - 10%, against - 26%.
Note the complete lack of change in the proportion against the proposition. I hate those moronic fuckwads.
Well then, I wish the folks at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide hadn’t lied to me when they told me that bit of Australian history.
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I doubt that they lied to you, they probably actually believed it. Unfortunately there are many people, even highly educated ones who should know better who have swallowed that myth whole. If they had bothered to actually read some original documents, the journals and letters of the early colonial administrators, for instance, as I have, they would have been aware that Australia was settled after the Enlightenment when attitudes towards indigenous people had changed radically. Indigenous people were recognised and regarded as fully human from the first day of settlement. One indicator of this is that the penalty for the murder of an Aborigine has always been the same as that for the murder of a white person. People were hanged for the murder of Aborigines in colonial times and after Federation. Yes, people did get away with murdering Aborigines at times but that was almost always due to the difficulty of proving the crime when there were often no witnesses.
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Citation needed! Maybe more than one.
Lets explain myself (sorry, my English is not good, not native not enough practice): I do not know a lot of this specific history. But I do know a lot about other places and time. And I think you are the one actually believing something when you should know better.
Trough out history, also after ‘the Enlightenment’, into very recent times, and also nowadays, people/countries/occupiers showed totally other behavior towards ‘the stranger’. Even when they are the newcomers. Feeling superior, occupying land and resources, and within that process making the strangest excuses, or even not, to excuse themselves. It seems a nearly universal thing. Something we should face.
In the same line, but way more friendlier 
I think the Dutch are very good at denie-ing (??argh) there history. Or saying "Oh, thats such a long time ago, that does not count. Or not necessary to tell at history lessons. Maybe even hiding for it. Even things happening in this moment of time (I live there) are less or more ‘ignored’. Or ‘done by other people’. Difficult to explain, sorry.
And with making money, indeed the Dutch loved en love that, even deaths are allowed. And a lot nasty stuff in between.
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If the folks who work at major Australian museums, whose job it is to educate people about history and care for the actual original documents you speak of, are telling the public – and international visitors – a fabricated story about Captain Cook and his crew declaring the Aborigines to be non-people for the sake of land acquisition, there’s a serious misinformation campaign going on.
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If that’s the case, then how do US Americans even stand up, given that they have no moral grounding on which to do so?
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Yes I think you are on to something. I googled more about it, and found text describe one leader’s approach early on to dealing with the locals near New Amsterdam. Basically, it was “treat them well - they are good people, and on top of that we need to partner with them” but then things started to get ugly when more and more Europeans started showing up.
By no means is America the only country in the world who treated its native people poorly in its early history. Or who continues to frequently do so.
But we are not a country defined by the mistakes our early settlers made.
?
I never said it is.
Sure. It’s a country that can only define itself in the ways that it does by failing to account accurately for its foundational atrocities. It’s a country that’s really more defined (by those who see it more clearly) by its tendency to call such foundational and still unaccounted for atrocities mere “mistakes.” Which is a delusional habit that causes its citizens and leaders to continue the failure to account properly for its foundational atrocities.
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Okay.
You’re trying super duper hard to pick a fight.
Not interested. Thank you.
What?
Just saying what I see and think, just like you.
I learned to see through the “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Hope you do some day too.
Have a nice day, and thank you too.
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Tuberculosis that many of them likely would not have contracted, were they not forced to to attend those overcrowded, poorly ventilated schools with other sick children (and in many cases trapped in locked dormitories with them at night, to keep them from running away).
And then, on top of that, there’s the whole issue of the numerous reported cases of sexual, physical and mental abuse that occurred at the schools as well.
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Henry Prinsip spent some time defending practices which seem barbaric to those not wholly invested in the system
‘Neck-chaining has not a pleasant sound, and perhaps that is the worst part of it.’ Prinsep’s final few months as Chief Protector were spent trying to defend Western Australia’s practices in the transnational sphere, including attending a meeting with the Secretary of State for Colonies Lord Elgin in 1908 to explain the government’s continued toleration of the practice. This image shows unnamed Aboriginal men probably in the Kimberley, date unknown.
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I may be getting myself in whole heap of trouble here, since I don’t have kids and haven’t really been paying attention to the latest literature, but part of being a parent involves the exercise of authority over a child. Now, this authority can be cruel, and ultimately illegal, or it can be enlightened-- while still restricting the autonomy of the child.
This same sort of dynamic can be extended to the adult aborigines-- Princip might have been a fair “parent”, but the basis for his paternalistic relationship over his protectees is morally lacking.
My reference to the Enlightenment was not to suggest that human beings ceased doing bad things to other human beings after the Enlightenment. It was simply in relation to the claim that “Aborigines were originally classified as animals. See, the trouble was that when Britain ‘discovered’ Australia, there were already plenty of people living there; their laws prevented them from just taking over.”
Neither of those claims is true. Firstly, Aborigines were never “classified as animals”. The best references that state the position of Aborigines as human beings under British and Australian law are in the legal cases. There have been criminal trials that have shown, over and over again, that Aborigines were regarded as human beings and that murdering them was subject to the same penalties as for the murder of a white person. In 1838, in R. v. Kilmeister (No. 2) [1838] NSWSupC 110, 7 men, Charles Kilmeister, James Oates, Edward Foley, John Russell, John Johnstone, William Hawkins and James Parry, were indicted, tried and convicted for the murder of Aborigines at Myall Creek in June 1838. The judge in the case stated the legal position clearly; it is in the record of the trial: “His Honor thought the information was as certain as was required by law, as it was only required to set forth that a human being had been killed…………” Human beings, all Aborigines, had been killed and 7 white men were hanged by the neck for it. There are other cases on the record where men were hanged or given life sentences for the murder of Aborigines.
Earlier, in 1789, Governor Arthur Phillip flogged (150 lashes each) convicts who had armed themselves with clubs and tried to attack some Aborigines and Phillip threatened to hang the next person who harmed an Aborigine. (Flood, Dr Josephine, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, Allen & Unwin, 2006, p 43,44)
Constable W. H. Willshire was charged and committed for trial with the murder of two Aboriginal men on February 22, 1891. In that case Willshire was acquitted not because Aborigines weren’t classified as human beings but because evidence at the trial showed that he had explicitly ordered that the Aborigines were to be arrested, not killed, but his order was disobeyed by two Aboriginal members of the Native Police. It is suspected that they killed the 2 Aboriginal men to settle a tribal grudge.
In May 1927, 2 police constables, St Jack and Regan were charged with the murder of an Aborigine. At the committal hearing, both were released, not because Aborigines weren’t classified as human beings but because the magistrate ruled that as a matter of law there was insufficient evidence, in particular, that there was no evidence that any Aborigine had been killed. There were no bodies, no witnesses and only hearsay from a missionary with mental health issues and a long history of lying about such things.
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Captain Cook and his crew weren’t “declaring the Aborigines to be non-people for the sake of land acquisition”, legally they didn’t need to. The fact is that although there were people in Australia when the British arrived, ‘their laws’ and international law, such as it was at that time, did not prevent the British from “just taking over”. There have been claims that Australia was settled on the basis of terra nullius and there are some who incorrectly claim that terra nullius means that there are no people (human beings) there. The term terra nullius means “nobody’s land” not in the sense that there’s nobody there but in the legal sense that it is territory which has never been under the sovereignty of any state, i.e. it is not the property of any state (or monarch). The Aborigines did not have anything recognisable as a ‘sovereign state’, no central government and international law, as it was practiced at that time, allowed colonisation of such territory despite the fact that it contained “uncivilized inhabitants in a primitive state of society” (Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, (1971) 17 FLR 141). And yes, there has been a serious misinformation campaign going on. If you read historian Michael Connor’s book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, he documents how certain historians ‘doctored’ the facts about the terms under which Britain colonised Australia. They did so because they were also activists, committed to the idea of re-establishing Aboriginal land rights and ultimately Aboriginal self-government/sovereignty, who felt that the truth didn’t serve their purposes well enough.
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Prinsep was right to argue that neck-chaining was the most humane method available. At the time, police officers had to go into remote areas on horseback to arrest Aboriginal people accused of various crimes from murder to cattle-killing. Once they had made arrests in such remote areas, they had the problem of how to humanely get the prisoners back for trial without them escaping. In 1907, they couldn’t radio for helicopters to fly the prisoners out. They couldn’t send for air-conditioned, 4WD paddy wagons to come and pick the prisoners up. In much of the country, it wasn’t even possible to use horse-drawn wagons, the terrain was too rough and there were no roads. The prisoners had to walk out, there were no alternatives to that. That meant chaining the group together in some fashion or they’d scatter in every direction. Now generally it was no problem for Aborigines to walk 20, 30, 50 miles. They walked such distances all their lives as hunter-gatherers. But try doing that in leg-irons. Their ankles would have had the skin rubbed off them in 10 miles. They would likely be permanently disabled after 20 miles with the leg irons scraping on bone. Manacles and chains attached at the wrists also made walking long distances very difficult and painful. All the weight is pulled to one side by the chain so prisoners are walking lopsided. That’s fine for short distances but for 50 miles? Very, very painful. The neck-chains, however, were reasonably comfortable to wear. Their weight and they weren’t very heavy (I’ve tried one on), rested on the shoulders, evenly centred. Unlike leg-irons which moved with each time you took a step, the neck-chains didn’t chafe against the skin, they just hung there. Of course, when you see the old photos, it looks barbaric. It was actually the most humane, least painful way of doing it.
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There is no correspondence in the files of the Chief Protector of the Aborigines for Western Australia that matches sender or receipient “Morgan” or in 1907 to/from the station “Broome”. The telegram delivery form, round date stamp, and method of charging both for the words in the message and words in the address are period correct – although why one would put “E.T.O. Perth” rather than just “Perth” thus paying an extra penny is beyond me – where else in Perth would a a telegraphic transmission go?
Of the two contemporaneous Charles Morgans I can find in the historical record who would seem the most likely prospects, one leased land for farming from Princep some 30 years earlier and 2000km from Broome in Dardanup, and the other was an aboriginal from Queensland who enlisted in the army for the world-war. There aren’t any C. Morgans in the directories of Western Australia colonial government officials near Broome, or shown as officers of the various church mission stations in the region.
Bearing in mind that Broome in 1907 suffered from infestation of “white ants”, and that contemporary local newspapers had several letters in the years surrounding that claimed various forms of arsenic were very effective at exterminating such ants – and bearing in mind telegram style, and bearing in mind that Nelson Mandela was neither an 800-year-old demigod nor a dildo collector; I’m not sure how much we can conclude about the true meaning of this telegram. It might be, as most modern reports have it “Send cask arsenic, exterminate aborigines, letter will follow”. It might also be “Send cask arsenic - exterminate, aborigines letter will follow” with “exterminate” indicating the intended use of the arsenic for pest control so that the stuff sent is suitable, rather then the arsenic compounds one might want for fireworks, shot, paint, tanning, or glass making.
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