Coranderrk became a successful self-supporting community, but the white occupiers of the colony exerted pressure on the Government to enable them to acquire the valuable land.
They wanted the Government to declare all the 'half-castes' white and to expel them from the Reserve. In January all 'able-bodied half-castes under the age of 35' were instructed to look for employment or seek settlement elsewhere. This was a means of undermining the successful functioning of the Reserve. Some people may find content on this website distressing. Read more.
Summary Records Photos Full page. By most Aboriginal people had left Coranderrk and re-located to Lake Tyers. Location: Healesville. While other stations were formed by missionaries or the state and comprised of a mixture of different groups, Coranderrk was founded by and for its Aboriginal residents who were a uniquely cohesive social group guided by a number of traditional leaders. As Jane Lydon notes in her study of photographs taken at the station, Coranderrk also became a place where meanings of Aboriginal culture and identity were forged and maintained both for Aboriginal people and colonial Victoria.
In a remarkable image entitled 'The Yarra Tribe Starting for Acheron', Lydon shows how 'the blacks' journey to Coranderrk was configured in biblical terms', an exodus of sorts to a chosen land.
Lydon argues that the notion of Coranderrk as a special place and its residents as a chosen people suffused the imaginations of the Coranderrk Aboriginal people and the white public. Green treated the Coranderrk Aboriginal people as free and independent men and women, respecting their freedom and their right to the land that they occupied. All of this combined to make Coranderrk an egalitarian community unique among the Aboriginal stations of this period.
We can therefore understand the political resistance of the Coranderrk community as an expression of their peculiarly liberal social and cultural circumstances.
If Coranderrk does not provide an accurate picture of the nature of Aboriginal resistance in the station era, it can tell us a great deal about the way subaltern political resistance is shaped and translated by colonial authorities. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, colonial archives 'produced as much as they recorded the realities they only ostensibly described'.
While the actions of the Coranderrk Aboriginal people are remarkable, Coranderrk was comprised of at most a few hundred people who were disenfranchised political non-entities in relation to the Victorian Government and therefore easily ignored by it. As the previous petition efforts examined here show, organised Aboriginal political activity in the station era was far more likely to become administrative detritus than it was to result in governmental inquiries.
Without diminishing the extraordinary efforts of the Coranderrk people to be heard, it is important to understand the reasons they were listened to. To do this, we need to interrogate the role that the Coranderrk rebellion and the inquiries it brought about played in the political discourse of the time. As noted above in the discussion of photography at the station, Coranderrk was the site at which the non-Aboriginal Victorian public constructed their ideas of Aboriginality and negotiated the relationship between coloniser and colonised.
Popular writing about Aboriginal people by Brough Smyth and others drew heavily on Thomas's work, and thus furthered the idea of Coranderrk as a metonym for Aboriginal people in the popular colonial imagination. The role of Coranderrk as a standard bearer for the management of Aboriginal people is further shown by the fact that managers of other stations in their annual reports commented upon how the rebellion was being received by people on their stations. An article in the Sydney Illustrated News from summarises the unique role of Coranderrk in conversations about the treatment of Aboriginal people at the time:.
The unfortunate Yarra Yarra aboriginals of Coranderrk have been preached at, written about, and made the pegs for ambitious leader writers to hang attacks on the Government on; have been inspected, superintended, catechised and missionaryised, and generally badgered around the world till the wonder is that at some of the deputations or royal receptions at which they have assisted they have not used their nullahs [sic] and show boomerangs on the thick skulls of the tormentors, who will allow them neither to live or die in their own fashion … Now there is an unholy notion afloat that these poor fellows should be removed to Gippsland, to tear them from their homes, from where their children were born … and transport them virtually to another climate where to a certainty they will soon be improved off the face of the earth.
Though itself disregarding the agency of the Coranderrk people, the article reflects a sense that the conversation surrounding their welfare showed little regard for their own beliefs or their long term survival. Indeed it can be argued that as Coranderrk became a proxy for Aboriginal people as a whole, engaging with their concerns became a means of absolving the conscience of non-Aboriginal Victoria for the crimes of colonialism. While some objected to the most grievous examples of cruelty towards Aboriginal people, few objected to the white supremacist civilising discourse that underwrote it.
Proof of this can be seen in the fact that the infamous 'Half Caste Act' was implemented only five years after the conclusion of the Coranderrk Inquiry. This Act, which historian Michael Christie refers to as 'an attempt at legal genocide', [28] greatly expanded the control of the BPA over the Aboriginal population and saw almost half of the population of the stations forced to move elsewhere.
The symbolic role that Coranderrk played in colonial discourse about the welfare of Aboriginal people allowed the inquiry to act as a ritual of absolution for non-Aboriginal Victoria. State inquiries also have the power to define what does and does not represent legitimate political expression and enshrine this consensus in the archive.
By defining certain events as worthy of archiving, the State inquiry silences other forms of political expression through omission. As Michel Foucault said, the archive is 'the law of what can be said and the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events'.
It is easy to discern this debate between the lines of the Coranderrk Inquiry Report. The rhetorical strategy of the representatives from the BPA placed on the report committee was to emphasise Coranderrk as an aberration; a settlement stirred to a frenzy by the political agendas of outside agitators.
With the remarkably high bar that the Coranderrk people set, it is no surprise that much of the quieter forms of resistance I will go on to examine were considered sub-political concerns. Thus, staging the Coranderrk Inquiry served both to allay the conscience of non-Aboriginal Victoria and marginalise Aboriginal political expression.
By uncritically using the Coranderrk narrative then, as historians we risk reproducing what Spivak termed the epistemic violence of colonial authority. To truly appreciate the nature of the political resistance era, we need to re-evaluate the way in which we use and understand the colonial archive. When seen as a tool through which colonial authority constructs its vision of itself and its subjects, the colonial archive loses its claim to transparency.
One possible way of recovering lost Aboriginal voices of resistance is to broaden our understanding of political resistance.
One of the great stereotypes about Aboriginal people during the station era and one of the greatest causes of complaint by station managers was their perceived laziness and tendency to shirk routinised labour. The archive is full of complaints about Aboriginal men in particular making seemingly concerted efforts to avoid the labour imposed on them by station managers. A letter from the Lake Condah station manager in complains of three 'half castes' 'strong and big enough for anything' who 'will not work, getting away at every opportunity and also keeping others from working'.
Frantz Fanon observed the disruptive power of indolence when he described laziness as 'the conscious sabotage of the colonial machine'. While the European temporal order emphasises punctuality and productivity in line with modern labour practices, Bain Attwood notes that an Aboriginal understanding of time 'had a rhythm centred in a subsistence economy on meeting immediate needs'.
Determining the structure and composition of the family unit was one of the main forms of control exercised by colonial authorities. Manipulating familial bonds was a way of ensuring compliance and of inculcating Aboriginal people with colonial ideology. Restricting families was also important because if they were left unregulated, they had the potential to form the nucleus for organised political action on the stations.
National Museum of Australia. William Barak, Thomas Bamfield, Robert Wandin and others led many delegations along the kilometre walk from Coranderrk to Melbourne to deliver written petitions and to talk to politicians and officials. Conditions at Coranderrk in the s and s became a progressive cause in Melbourne society.
Barak and Bamfield were particularly adept at working with European allies, like politician Graham Berry and philanthropist Anne Bon, to bring the demands of Coranderrk residents to public attention. Coranderrk became the subject of many newspaper articles and questions in parliament. Management of the reserve was investigated as part of the Royal Commission on the Aborigines.
While a deputation of Coranderrk leaders protested against the proposed law, they could not prevent its adoption. The law struck at the very identity of the Kulin people. It had a devastating impact on the community at Coranderrk and other Aboriginal stations, halving resident populations and splitting families. Despite their efforts, the Coranderrk community could not overcome overwhelming pressure from settlers and developers to sell or lease portions of Coranderrk. Coranderrk was officially closed as an Aboriginal station in From the s portions had been carved off the holding, acres leased and an illegal road built.
The last Kulin resident died in In the remaining reserve was divided up for soldier settlement. In Coranderrk cemetery was handed back to the Wurundjeri people. Over the next decade, an additional hectares of Coranderrk was acquired by the Kulin people. Coranderrk Aboriginal station report, Parliament of Victoria. Minutes of evidence project — Victorian Parliamentary Coranderrk Inquiry.
The National Museum of Australia acknowledges First Australians and recognises their continuous connection to country, community and culture. Defining Moments Coranderrk.
William Barak and the Aboriginal community of Coranderrk. Simon Wonga, Chief of the Yarra Yarra tribe,
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