The Utter Myth of ‘Invasion Day’

The great conceit of the Annual Festival of Lefty Whining – the weeks leading up to Australia Day – is that Australia was ‘invaded’. Aboriginal activists, ignoring the fact that they owe everything they have – indeed, given the obviously miniscule-to-non-existent Aboriginal ancestry of the most vocal of them, their very existence – to European arrival, whine and moan and carp about ‘Invasion Day’.

There’s only one problem with this bitching and moaning: it’s a load of complete and utter bullshit.

The fundamental basis for this ahistorical nonsense is the Marxist notion of ‘Settler Colonialism’, a notion which is to history as Marx’s ‘Labour Theory of Value’ is to economics. The ‘Settler Colonialism’ argument goes, roughly, that wicked, white, European nations rode in, a-whoopin’ an’ a-hollerin’, to the lands of peaceful and bucolic brown folks with the sole goal of wiping out the lot of them (’cept the women-folk, o’ course: they raped them) and stealing their land.

This is a load of arrant tosh.

In Australia, just as in India and the Americas, the European powers’ ‘colonial’ practice was, for centuries, to set up small trading posts and strategic forts on the coastal fringes of newly discovered lands. These areas were annexed, but most of the land, especially the vast interiors, were left almost entirely in indigenous hands.

This is how colonialism operated for centuries, from the Age of Discovery right up until the 19th century. It was only in the late stages of colonialism that wholesale takeovers began to take place. Almost all of what people think of, when they think of the plight of the Amerindians, took place in a relatively brief window from the 1850s to the early 1900s (and even then, was often the subject of fierce public debate: the Trail of Tears was declared outright illegal by the US Supreme Court and Davy Crockett quit the US in disgust).

Australia was settled just as this fundamental shift in colonial practice was about to begin and it followed the same pattern.

The goal of the First Fleet was to occupy a small colony, not invade a continent […]

In fact, the first legal officer of NSW, David Collins, wrote in 1788 that the goal of the First Fleet was not to invade the country but to occupy small areas of land:

‘By the definition of our boundaries it will be seen that we were confined along the coast of this continent to such parts of it as were navigated by Captain Cook, without infringing on … the right of discovery [and] of that right … Great Britain alone has followed up the discoveries she has made in this country by at once establishing in it a regular colony and civil government.’

First Governor Arthur Phillip, who greatly respected and admired the Aboriginal people (admiration, not ‘racist’ disdain, for indigenous people was also the dominant theme of early settlers of the Americas, north and south, from Columbus onward), never perceived a need to negotiate a ‘treaty’ for the Sydney Cove settlement, because the colony was seen as nothing more than a garrison settlement.

The intention was not to invade, but to form strategic outposts and source flaxwood in a race with the French. That is why the second settlement after Sydney Cove, was not on land nearby. Instead, Phillip travelled to Norfolk Island off the coast of Brisbane, a place not known to Aboriginal people. As Geoffrey Blainey explains in the Australian, ‘Its inhabitants [on Norfolk Island] certainly have no reason to talk of Invasion Day.’

Indeed, not even Aboriginal people tended to see the European newcomers as ‘invaders’.

First encounters with Europeans were arguably experienced by Aboriginal people in anything but territorial terms. They were most often, it seems, primarily an encounter with relatives who had gone to the spirit world and returned…

What about the First Fleet? Historian Bain Attwood argues:

In the beginning, Phillip’s party found it difficult to forge a relationship with the Aboriginal people. Indeed, several months after the British had landed, Phillip reported that the local people repeatedly avoided them. In due course, a good deal of cross-cultural exchange did in fact occur…

From early Dutch encounters to the January 26, European encounters with the British were mostly characterised by indifference. Labelling Australia Day an ‘invasion’ ignores the fact Aboriginal people never viewed early European encounters as territorial usurpation.

Viewed through the long lens of deep history, the arrival of Europeans in Tasmania can be seen as the final act of a drama played out over tens of millennia. Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that successive Aboriginal groups settled Tasmania in waves, spaced thousands of years apart. As each new group moved in from across the desert that is now Bass Strait, earlier groups were displaced south and west. Such a process would surely have been a mix of peaceful integration and bitter warfare.

Which is what happened after 1788. With, in fact, much less bloodshed than popularly imagined.

Academic research done by one of Australia’s most renowned academics, William Stanner, shows in his book White Man Got No Dreaming, that many Aboriginal people chose to migrate to colonised areas for work and opportunity.

‘… for every Aboriginal who, so to speak, had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other had sought them out. More would have gone to European centres sooner had it not been that their way was often barred by hostile Aborigines. As late as the early 1930s I was able to see for myself the battles between the encroaching myalls and weakening, now-sedentary groups who had monopolised European sources of supply and work.’

Stanner never encountered an Aboriginal who ever wanted to return to the bush and their traditional way of life, even in cases of miserable urban circumstances. They simply ‘went because they wanted to, and stayed because they wanted to’.

Notably, even today, not the most fervent denouncer of ‘the colony’ chooses to leave it and return to an authentically traditional way of life. Funny about that.

One can forgiven for suspecting that, for all their ‘Invasion Day’ blatherskite, deep down they recognise that in 200 years Australians, white, black and every other colour, have built a modern, prosperous, free nation that is the envy of much of the world. A process that began on January 26, 1788.

And that’s something worth celebrating, indeed.