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September 9, 2009
Bruce Buchan's recent Empire of Political Thought investigates how European colonists in Australia represented the indigenous peoples they found there, and how they governed them using Western political thought. Buchan argues that an ideological framework drawn from Western traditions rendered indigenous peoples familiar to Europeans.
In this review of the book Tim Rowse says that:
Since the High Court of Australia rejected the legal doctrine terra nullius in its judgment in Mabo vs the State of Queensland in 1992, it has been tempting to treat terra nullius as the central and defining concept in the British colonisation of Australia. As David Ritter... pointed out, even if no British authority explicitly enunciated terra nullius while taking possession of the continent, the view that Aborigines had neither property nor government was implicit in the conduct of British authority. In particular, by neglecting to sign treaties with Aborigines and by ruling that Aborigines were individual subjects of the Crown’s undivided jurisdiction (an evolving doctrine of the New South Wales Supreme Court in the 1830s), the British departed from their North American practice of making agreements of various kinds and recognising in various ways collective Indigenous entities.
The exceptional character of the British approach to sovereignty in Australia was further underlined when the Crown made a treaty with Maori tribes in 1840. In short, it seems to many historians that Australia was an exception within the story of British colonisation in the extent to which the native presence here was denied, dismissed and, subsequently, degraded. As a doctrinal summation of that distinctly shameful history, terra nullius has come to signify Australian exceptionalism.
Buchan argues otherwise. His argument is that that a range of British political thinkers provided a rationale for the‘subjection’ of Indigenous peoples by articulating the view that such peoples were in want of effective government and regular conduct due to the absence of property relations among them. The deficiencies of Indigenous people were thus framed by understandings of concepts of ‘civility’, ‘government’, and ‘society’ in European and British political thought. In opposition to the reason and freedom of European civility, government and society, Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere were perceived to live in associations bound by unalterable custom and tradition.
The Britons who colonised Australia, Buchan argues, applied the conceptual pair ‘civilisation’/’savagery’ that they had used in North America. The Indigenous inhabitants of Australia were almost uniformly portrayed by the colonists as “savages” whose status in the new colony was at best uncertain’ ‘too uncivilised for a treaty to be made’. Savagery’ meant that Aborigines were people without any law. The Indigenous peoples of Australia were seen as ‘primitive’, lacking their own government, or identity as ‘nations’. The nation as a self-governing community was not applied in Australia. All Indigenous laws were merely “barbarous customs”.
This notion of Indigenous tribes as lacking‘government’ and bound by immemorial custom and lacking government isdeeply entrenched. Rowe says that Buchan:
acknowledges that the central idea ‘civilization’/’savagery’ was losing coherence as it acquired new significance. As he explains, the formation of settler-colonial liberalism in Australia included the reception of racial theories of human difference that challenged historical or ‘stadial’ theories. While ‘stadial’ theory had assumed all humans to be on the same developmental path, with some peoples more advanced than others, [passing from primitive savagery (hunting and gathering), to barbarism (pastoralism), agriculture (as in feudal Europe), andfinally civilised commerce and foreign trade] racial thought postulated that some peoples were inherently unable to develop. The apparently refractory quality of Aborigines helped to make racial thought more plausible, and the two paradigms co-existed in the absence of a clear scientific criterion or practical necessity for making a decisive choice between them.
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This theme is explored in the recent film Precinct 9.