Early History

One Racist Nation: A United White Australia, 1901 From The Age, 13 May 1858: ‘… Let us then hear no more imbecile querulousness at our rapid advances in self-government. … If we were unfit to be entrusted with honest self-government, as the degenerate Creoles and half-savage Indians and Negroes of South America are unfit, there would indeed be rational ground for objection. But, in simple truth we are far better adapted for this prerogative of civilised man than any one of the most refined nations of the Old World. Our people are as a matter of fact the picked men of Europe; and, as a consequence, intelligence, enterprise, energy and spirit are immeasurably more universal here…’ (in Manning Clark, 1957: 333). * The Worker, (Brisbane) 30 March 1901: ‘The fight is at hand – for a White Australia, the greatest and most pregnant question that has ever been placed before the Australian people…. It is the grandest fight you will ever have a chance of taking part in – the fight for a WHITE AUSTRALIA. … the sinuous movements of the deadly coloured alien biped lurking in the scrub with cane knife in his mudhook waiting to butcher the first casual white victim that comes along … It’s just as clear as figgers, Sure as one and one make two, Folks as make black slaves of niggers Want to make white slaves out of you.’ (Ibid.: 499-501). * Alfred Deakin, Liberal Protectionist, 12 September 1901: ‘… the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races…. It is only necessary to say that they do not and cannot blend with us; that we do not, cannot, and ought not to blend with them…. ‘This was the note which touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation … to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded. A coloured occupation would make a practical diminution of its extent of the most serious kind … The programme of a ‘white Australia’ means … its preservation for the future…’ (Ibid.: 494-495).

End of a Century: Entering a New World

On the whole, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ngarrindjeri people were literate in English and spoke it either as a first language or a well-used second language. With their country taken from them, they had spent some two or three generations embedded unwillingly in an alien economy, dominated by an alien society. They had reluctantly come to terms with a type of living which involved a money economy, effective confinement to a small village of neatly-arrayed cottages, their children at school for up to ten years, irregular and uninspiring work, and the domination of Christianity over their lives.

From an other viewpoint, the traditional life had become barely a memory: no young men had been fully initiated for twenty years; knowledge of descent groups had become blurred or had been lost altogether; traditional forms of political organisation, such as the tendi or yanarumi, had long gone, having had no powers for a couple of generations. Even knowledge of the environment which had sustained countless generations of their ancestors was fading, as access to the environment beyond the boundaries of Point McLeay became more constrained. The various mythologies and stories brought to Point McLeay by people from different areas had been joined together to become the bits and pieces of Ngarrindjeri tradition.
Of course, most adults in 1900 would have known, even if they did not speak, the full language, a language rich in words, phrases and allusions relating to a hunting and gathering life in a bountiful environment, but one with necessarily few or no words relating to an agricultural or industrial economy. Inevitably, the young generation was less interested in a language which appeared to be irrelevant except as a marker of who was in and who was out: even the children of Albert Karloan and Pinkie Mack learnt only the bare one or two hundred words of Ngarrindjeri that a child would have known in traditional society. Even a ‘full-blood’ such as David Unaipon, born in 1872, appears to have gone to his grave in 1967 without a full knowledge of the language.
In 1900, most of the elders at Point McLeay would have had some knowledge of traditional life passed on to them in their youth. After all, an elder in 1900 would have been a young child in the 1850s and 1860s, long after the depredations of invasion had swept over their country: even by 1900, an elder would have had to be over seventy years old to remember aspects of traditional life untouched by the invasion. So all understandings of tradition were coloured by the knowledge of the unwelcome and unavoidable presence of others. At the same time, even the elders did not spurn what they needed from the modern economy to survive: liquor, newspapers, tobacco, clothes, and so on: in the absence of a traditional package of cultural artifacts to nurture them, they adopted much of the alien package and made it their own, shared it with their children and grandchildren, and without too much reflection, preoccupied as they were with getting by from one day to the next, passed it on to further generations.