Now blackwashing is coming for Australia’s convict history.
Blackwashing has been as de rigueur for modern ‘historians’ in recent years as it has for Hollywood. It consists of taking inconveniently ‘white’ historical facts and achievements, finding a vanishingly small black contribution and re-writing the whole thing to be yet another ‘stunning’ so-called achievement of non-whites.
Take the absurd ‘1001 Muslim Inventions’ taradiddle, for instance. Among its many absurdities is claiming that a Muslim ‘invented flight’. In fact, he glued feathers to his body, jumped off a rooftop in Cordoba and injured himself badly. It wasn’t even falling with style: it was just falling.
In classical music, a sole, almost completely forgotten 19th-century black composer is touted as supposedly every bit as important as Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. Bruce Pascoe’s fantasy, Dark Emu, ludicrously claims that Aborigines invented everything from agriculture to democracy. Māori are claimed to have discovered Antarctica.
And so it goes.
Santilla Chingaipe’s book, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia, is even more ludicrous than the idiotic 1619 Project.
Of the roughly 760 convicts who arrived in Sydney in 1788 on the First Fleet, at least 15 were black. Between 1788 and 1842, about 80,000 male and female convicts were transported to NSW, of whom as many as 500 were of African descent.
Chingaipe argues that these black convicts have been “whitewashed” from Australian history.
So… less than two per cent of the First Fleet and barely over half a per cent of all convicts. Even that’s being generous, given that Chingaipe admits to “inferring” their “black” status from euphemistic references to ‘dusky’ complexions or ‘woolly’ hair’.
And Karl Marx’s family called him “the Moor”. Clearly, then, Marx was black.
These people haven’t been “whitewashed” from history: they just weren’t important enough to merit much mention.
They are certainly missing from the Museums of History NSW website, which informs visitors that “almost two-thirds of convicts were English (along with a small number of Scottish and Welsh), with the Irish making up the remaining one third”.
So, nearly every convict was white, from the United Kingdom. Remind me again, why we’re supposed to ignore that and hyperfocus on a tiny number who contributed practically nothing to Australia’s overall history?
Chingaipe’s a-historic nonsense doesn’t stop there, though.
The first decades of the convict system in Australia coincided with the last decades of the slave trade, and Chingaipe is at pains to show how the two intersected.
Desperate would be a better description. Drawing longer bows than Agincourt might be another. Not content with ridiculously ginning up the miniscule number of black convicts, Chingaipe then tries to claim that the entire convict system was supposedly ‘slavery’.
Except that it absolutely wasn’t.
Robert Hughes drew a clear distinction between the two in The Fatal Shore: “The master owns the slave: his work, his time, his person. Slaves are bought and sold, they are property. Their rights begin and end with their status as chattels … None of these conditions applied to the convicts Britain exiled to Australia. Each served a fixed term of punishment and then became free. None was a chattel, the property of a master. All of them, within limits, had the right to sell some portion of their labour on the free market … Their masters did not have the right to flog them; such punishments could only be inflicted by the sentence of a magistrate … Their children were born free.”
As if facts ever mattered when black grievance is at stake.
Far from ‘shaping’ Australia, slavery mattered in Australia only by its absence. When Arthur Phillip declared that, “There can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves,” he outlawed slavery in Australia 20 years before it was banned in the rest of Britain’s domains.
And centuries before black Africans stopped enslaving each other. As, indeed, they still are.
