Here is the article, "Fair Dinkum Under Platform 15", that appeared in the most recent edition of the Salisbury Review:
In the week leading up to Australia Day 2019, which commemorates the beginning of British settlement in Australia, came the announcement that the remains of British explorer, navigator and cartographer, Matthew Flinders, had been found under London’s Euston Station. Flinders is remembered for being the commander of the first crew, in 1802-03, to circumnavigate Australia. Amongst the company on HMS Investigatorwas an Indigenous Australian, Bungaree, a Kuringgai man from an areas 50 kilometres or so north of Sydney. He accompanied Flinders on the entirety of the journey and proved invaluable in ensuring all the men got back to Sydney alive. But activist-historians, of course, cannot leave it at that. Flinders University Indigenous Archaeology professor, Claire Smith, just had to spoil a story of genuine British-Aboriginal comraderie by interjecting a note of PC self-righteousness: “There are many people who also were great explorers and contributed [alongside Matthew Flinders], but they didn’t have the idea of colonising the land like the British did.”
It is true that Indigenous Australians, perhaps 750,000 in number at the foundation of New South Wales in 1788, “didn’t have the idea of colonising the land like the British did”. This is exactly why their 47,000-60,000 year dominion over the Great Southern Land was destined to end, whether or not the British colonised the continent. The French, for instance, were very interested in Australia. On April 8, 1802, twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Flinders and French maritime explorer Nicolas Baudin confronted each other off the southern coastline. Although their two respective countries were, for all they knew, still at war, Flinders and Baudin peaceably breakfasted together and exchanged charts and information. If Napoleon had beaten Wellington at Waterloo, Encounter Bay might today be known as Baie des Invalides. As it is, the third great peninsula of South Australia, Fleurieu Peninsula, is named after French explorer Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu.
We should also not forget that on his 1803 return voyage to England, Matthew Flinders was incarcerated by the French on the island of Mauritius for six long years. His health was never the same, and yet while in captivity he came up with the idea of conjoining “New Holland” with “New South Wales” under the larger appellation of “Australia”. Lachlan Macquarie, the outstanding governor of New South Wales between 1810-21, would go on to use this as a way of securing continental-wide British sovereignty. The PC brigade no doubt view this as a mark against Matthew Flinders, and yet history tells us that, not only France but Prussia and then the Kaiserreich had an interest in Oceania. Would Indigenous Australians have fared better in an Antipodean version of Mittelafrica? In 1912, the Reichstag recorded 200,000 troublesome Africans being gunned down by their colonial authorities.
Indigenous Australians did not “have the idea of colonising the land like the British did” but it was not only European who had an acquisitive eye on Australia. The continent would have been absorbed into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (1930-45) without Commonwealth and American military resistance to Imperial Japan. Now Sino revivalism poses as similar challenge to our sovereignty. Approximately 350 years before Captain Cook arrived on the scene, China’s Admiral Zheng He and vice-admirals Hong Bao and Zhou Man were here. It was our good fortune – and here I include Indigenous Australians – that various Ming emperors never followed up on these discoveries. Still, the People’s Republic of China has begun to behave as if those fifteenth-century maritime exploits might represent something more than historical footnotes. Already President-for-life Xi Jinping is challenging the territorial sovereignty of the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia in the South China Sea. A Chinese version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere might be in the offing.
The conservative historian Keith Windschuttle recently put the matter of sovereignty rather succinctly: “Aboriginal society never had the power to deny any of the strangers from overseas the right to drop anchor in their waters or pitch tents on their shores.” Given that, the Aboriginal people would have been worse off if faced with an alternative imperial and/or colonial power. The British, at the time of settlement, were particularly under the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. Its admonitions against slavery and endorsement of the principle that “all individuals were equal before both God and the law”, argued Windschuttle, meant “the first contacts between British and Aboriginal culture would involve far less violence than any possible scenario”.
This is not saying there was no violence and dispossession, and yet the Flinders-Bungaree friendship, as depicted in Flinders’ A Voyage to Terra Australis(1814), is one to applaud. Flinders noted in his memoir, published one day before his premature death at the age of only 40, that Bungaree was a fine companion, intelligent and very kind to Trim, the ship’s cat. He was also invaluable in preventing food poisoning along the way – if Bungaree could not identify a local plant, nut or berry, the crew omitted it from their diet. Bungaree was, additionally, helpful in communicating with the coastal tribes they encountered on their voyage. This communication was, nevertheless, inexact. It took the form of hand gestures and so forth, since there were approximately 250 Aboriginal language groups at the time.
It has become increasingly de rigueuramongst our professoriate to refer to these 250 discrete Aboriginal language groups as 250 distinct nations. I am surely contravening PC orthodoxy – but not common sense – to point out that this is to bend our understanding of “nation” beyond all recognition. The militant Aboriginal lobby group, as distinct from a much conservative Aboriginal movement, will not be satisfied until the descendants of these tribal groups join together in the form of a political entity that is separate, or at least autonomous in some form, from the Commonwealth of Australia, which is an actualnation that federated on January 1st, 1901 – one continent, two nations. For the militants, along with as many as 20 per cent of indoctrinated non-Indigenous Australians, Australia Day is a celebration not of nationhood but genocide.
There are, thank goodness, sensible Indigenous Australians who know that the best future for their progeny is within mainstream Australian society. Warren Mundine, a member of the Bundjalung people and former national president of the Australian Labor Party, became so fed up with PC militants (Aboriginal and otherwise) that he became the leading voice for the other side of the Indigenous movement – the conservative side. His memoir, Warren Mundine in black and white(2018), turns up all kinds of paradoxes that radical activists do not want us to know: for instance, Indigenous Australians are more likely to be practising Christians than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
Mundine’s candidature on behalf of the (sometimes) conservative Liberal Party in the forthcoming 2019 Federal election has drawn a double-helping of abuse from the lefties. Not only is he a political traitor for abandoning the Labor Party but an identity traitor. Jacinta Price, another Indigenous conservative candidate in the 2019 election, has been pummelled even more by the PC brigade for insisting that identity politics/separatism has increased domestic violence against Aboriginal women and children in the Northern Territory. Undeterred, she has come out in favour of retaining Australia Day on January 26: “By ignoring this date, we’re ignoring the significance of this particular date and we do need to learn about country’s history in its entirety – all that is really horrible about our history, but all that is really good about our history.” This innocuous statement has, believe it or not, marked out Jacinta Price, in the eyes of social media jackals, as identity traitor #1.
The discovery of Matthew Flinders’ remains below Euston Station is especially exciting to South Australians, since the brilliant cartographer literally put most of our coastline on the map. He never named anything after himself but, out of respect for his achievement, we have in South Australia alone Flinders Street, Flinders Chase Conservation Park, Flinders Ranges, Flinders University, Flinders Hospital, and so on. As a school child I competed against students in Flinders House. My first full-time employment was in far-way country town of Streaky Bay, named after a one-line entry in Flinders’ log for February 5, 1802: “And the water was much discoloured…and I called it Streaky Bay.” The connection of all these things tells me, if I did not already know, that we are bound to each in the most fascinating ways – not least to Bungaree, the first Australian-born man, thanks to Matthew Flinders’ expedition, to circumnavigate Terra Australis.
