GUEST POST: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick on An Indigenous South

An Indigenous South: German writers on colonial South Australia, edited by Peter Monteath and Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, shines a light on a forgotten aspect of South Australia’s history.

The book collects the writing of German settlers and visitors to Australia, charting the course of German–Australian encounters from first contacts, through the ruptures and violence of a relentlessly expanding European presence and into the twentieth century.

Co-editor Matthew P. Fitzpatrick presented a fascinating talk on the book at the September meeting of the Friends of the Lutheran Archives. We’re pleased now to be able to share this in-depth explanation of the book with a wider audience.

‘Einheimisch’: German (Mis)Understandings of Indigenous Australians

An Indigenous South: German writers on colonial South Australia reflects the entangled Indigenous and European histories of Adelaide/Tarndanya. The city’s European name commemorates the German royal Adelheid von Sachsen-Meiningen, who was later known as Queen Adelaide of the United Kingdom and Hanover. The land upon which this city has been built, however, is Tarndanya, the name given to the area by the Kaurna Miyurna, the custodians and traditional owners of the land whose culture and language marked the region for the twenty millennia before it was effaced by the European settlers who built upon it a European-style city.

Not only the Kaurna people but all of South Australia’s Indigenous peoples saw their country knitted together with other British settler colonies to become part of the nation-state of Australia. Even those Aboriginal nations living beyond the bounds of settlement were declared subjects of the British Crown, with their law deliberately set aside as ‘too “savage” to be recognised’.[1]

Unsettling South Australia and ‘Anglobalisation’

In the 21st century, the enormity of these events is well understood by South Australia’s First Nations peoples but is still sinking into the historical thinking of its non-Indigenous settler population. As histories reassessing South Australia’s frontier history emerge, difficult facts about the processes and the extent of dispossession have come more clearly into view. It still remains difficult to summon up a mental picture of the grave historical realities that sit behind the city of Adelaide. Walking along North Terrace or through Rundle Mall in central Adelaide, the shape and rhythms of Kaurna Country prior to the long process of dispossession have become increasingly difficult to imagine. Less than two hundred years ago, however, the entire state of South Australia was unmistakably Indigenous.

Wresting this territory from Indigenous people was a violent process. Most shocking were the episodes of physical violence such as the murders of Aboriginal people by pastoralists,[2] but also not to be overlooked were episodes of violence to land management practices and the religious, cosmological and epistemological frameworks within which Aboriginal people had lived for millennia.[3]

The retrieval of these has required painstaking work by the First Nations people of the twentieth and 21st centuries.[4] In a bitter irony, the Indigenous record was so effectively obscured in South Australia that the process of reclaiming culture and language has required a careful reading of the records left by settler-colonists against the grain, because some of these colonists, particularly the missionaries that you all know so well, had assiduously recorded the language and culture of local people in great detail. Deep immersion in colonial materials has proved itself indispensable to the processes of Indigenous cultural reconstruction.[5] It is hoped that the current volume will further assist in this process. 

Many of South Australia’s missionaries, anthropologists and settlers were of course German in origin. This basic but often overlooked fact adds an often-hidden complexity to histories of Australian colonisation that have traditionally focused on the central role of Britain and its empire, a one-dimensional view of the past enthusiastically labelled ‘Anglobalisation’ by one historian.[6] Peeling back this image of South Australia as simply another British colony in a predominantly British colonial world has required a deep engagement with the myriad other settler populations that came to Australia prior to World War One. Some of this recovery work has already been done, and there is now a clearly emerging record of the role played by Germans,[7] alongside others such as Chinese and Afghan settlers in the early years of South Australia.[8] As Peter has made clear,[9] not only were Germans thick on the ground in the early years of South Australia’s colonisation, these Germans had very different experiences.

Often missing, however, from this picture of a more multicultural understanding of settler colonialism is a third crucial dimension, namely the connections between this history of non-British colonisation and the history of South Australia’s frontier encounters and entanglements with First Nations peoples.[10] It is this missing but integral element of South Australia’s colonial history that the book addresses.

Histories of Where and for Whom?

An Indigenous South should not be mistaken for an incontestable history of the First Nations of South Australia. It is not a collection of facts. Instead, it is primarily a collection of representations (and misrepresentations) of Indigenous people and their lives by the German migrants, scientists, missionaries and sojourners that peter has just described, the majority of whom had very little contact with or understanding of those they were describing. Although some of these descriptions were the product of long periods of interaction and the gradual accumulation of linguistic and cultural competence resulting in elaborate and extremely systematised descriptions, others were almost offhanded and marginal comments that offer little more than a set of prejudicial assumptions within larger works devoted to other concerns.

Many of the descriptions documented by the book are so shockingly racist that reprinting them can only be justified by the fact that far too often the virulent racism that permeated colonial Australia has been diluted or hidden from view. Regrettably, it is only by studying the colonial past in its raw and ugly complexity, with attention to the specific contexts within which racism operated and the structures that it served, that we can approach the localised ‘truth-telling about our history’ called for by the Indigenous authors of the 2017 ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.[11] Failing to present this painful evidence of past racism, which extended into the German community of colonial Australia, would make the historical mistreatment of Indigenous Australians somehow inexplicable, even unbelievable, if all that remained of the historical record of frontier interactions were friendly encounters and entanglements. 

Shifting to the German dimension of this book, a secondary contribution that might be expected from a source collection devoted to the specifically German complexion of frontier interactions with Indigenous Australians relates to the ongoing question of the continuities that some historians have drawn between colonial racism and the racially based foundations of later Nazi genocide.[12] Colonial racism and colonial violence, whether in Australia or in one of Germany’s overseas colonies gain their significance, according to these historians, through the ostensible ‘boomerang effect’ that this violence had in Europe.[13] Attempts to draw such lines of continuity and causality have proved extremely controversial, however, and should be approached with caution. There are some problems, for example, with mining events on the colonial frontier to serve as a prelude to later European events. That is not to dismiss links between these disparate histories outright.[14] Indeed, discussions and descriptions of Indigenous Australians, particularly those of late colonial period anthropologists might well have found a later echo in the racial ‘science’ of the Nazi period.

Nonetheless, this attempt to find a historical lineage for the Holocaust in colonial events has been sidestepped in this volume in favour of a more concentrated, site-specific portrait of the South Australian frontier and the Germans’ role in creating a racist colonial imaginary. To do otherwise would be to risk instrumentalising the history of the South Australian frontier and the Germans’ role in it as a mere window through which to view Germany’s history. It would be a great disservice to Indigenous Australians if the German sources reproduced here were simply deployed to serve intrinsically German debates, in search of a tortured line of racism that somehow led from Adelaide to Auschwitz. Far more urgent for this project is the Australian experience of colonial relations and the modes of thought that both facilitated and critiqued violence and dispossession.

The firm context of this book, therefore, is the experience and nature of settler colonialism in Australia, itself a fraught enough field of research in which firm lines of historiographical difference have been drawn. South Australia shares a number of attributes with other settler colonies that several historians, most notably Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, have argued were based on a logic of displacement and dispossession underwrite and, for some, even intrinsically eliminatory and even tacitly genocidal in their expectations and plans for the Indigenous peoples whose lands they settled.[15] This radical picture of settler colonialism has not, however, met with universal acceptance. Shino Kinoshi, for example, has rightly pointed out that this understanding leaves ‘little space for Indigenous (or even “settler”) agency.’[16] Miranda Johnson too has persuasively argued that ‘settler colonialism obliges us to demonstrate a singular logic’ that ultimately flattens complex historical terrain,[17] while Tim Rowse has convincingly insisted that the emphasis on an ‘eliminationist logic’ posited by settler colonial studies overlooks the many ways in which settler-colonialists approached Indigenous peoples in differing contexts, and, importantly, how Indigenous peoples engaged with and actively responded to this.[18] We want to capture this type of complexity in our book.

German Settlers, Sojourners and Missionaries

The sources presented in this book reflect not only the complexities of colonisation and frontier relations, but also the differences within the German population that settled in South Australia.  While the colony’s German history has primarily been associated with the persecuted ‘Old Lutherans’ from the regions of Silesia, Brandenburg and Posen who sought refuge in a ‘paradise of dissent’ from 1838,[19] in reality the story of German migration has, as Peter has suggested, many strands. The complexity of the motivations leading to travel to the Antipodes is reflected in the authors gathered here.

Conclusion

The Germans who wrote about the First Nations people of South Australia did so from a wide range of positions. Some of them were settlers, others were physical anthropologists seeking to verify their pseudo-scientific theories of biological racism. Others still came to South Australia with the objective of Christianising Indigenous people after having sought to understand the particularities of their language and culture. Many, however, were simply passing through as travellers, leaving only a careless impression of a fleeting visit. Together, however, they were instrumental in shaping understandings of Australia’s First Nations peoples in the German speaking world and in Australia itself. Despite their accounts’ numerous inaccuracies, misunderstandings and in some cases clear disregard or contempt for Indigenous peoples, it is because of the often-forgotten influence of their views that they require study if the effects of such frontier encounters are to be understood.

The record of these Germans and their interactions with Indigenous peoples represents an important and rarely glimpsed part of the history of European colonialism in South Australia that lies beyond the better-known experience of British subjects. Their impressions of Indigenous life make the racial complexion of frontier relations in South Australia more intelligible and illustrate the full range of responses to colonial era encounters and entanglements. The chapters of this book, we hope, reveal both the reasoning that motivated the search for avenues of intercommunal understanding and the callous indifference and offhanded racism of those who, in the name of Europeanisation and civilisation, assumed the historical necessity of the demise of those who had lived in Southern Australia since time immemorial.    


[1] Damen Ward, ‘Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840–60’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34(4), 2006, 496.

[2] Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: the South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory, (Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 2001).

[3] For attempts to address this in approaches to Indigenous history, see Karen Martin – Booran Mirraboopa, ‘Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and Indigenist Re‐search’, Journal of Australian Studies, 27(76), 2003, 203–214; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28(78), 2013, 331-347

[4] Lewis O’Brien, Irene Watson, ‘In Conversation with Uncle Lewis: Bushfires, Weather-Makers, Collective Management’, AlterNative 10(5), 2014, 450–461.

[5] Rob Amery, ‘The First Lutheran Missionaries in South Australia and their contribution to Kaurna language reclamation’, Journal of Friends of Lutheran Archives, 2000, 30–58.

[6] Niall Ferguson, ‘British Imperialism Revisited: The Costs and Benefits of “Anglobalization”’, Historically Speaking 4(4), 2003, 21–27.

[7] Peter Monteath (ed.) Germans and Their Descendants in South Australia, (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011).

[8] See for example Carmel Pascale, ‘Chinese immigration restriction and the pursuit of nationalist ideals in colonial South Australia’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 44, 2016, 89–101; Katharine Bartsch, ‘Building identity in the colonial city: the case of the Adelaide Mosque’, Contemporary Islam, 9, 2015, 247–270. 

[9] Peter Monteath (ed.) Germans and Their Descendants in South Australia.

[10] For recent histories of Indigenous interactions with European settlers see for example Skye Krichauff, ‘Mullawirraburka and Kadlitpinna: How and Why Influential Individuals Facilitated Amicable Cross-Cultural Relations in the Adelaide District, 1836‒1840’, History Australia, 18(2), 2021, 342–369. For South Asians in colonial Australia and their interactions with Indigenous peoples, see Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia, (Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2018).

[11] ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ in Shireen Morris (ed.) A Rightful Place: A Roadmap to Recognition, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2017), 3.

[12] For a recent overview of a long debate, see Thomas Kühne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research 15(3), 2013, 339–362.

[13] For an exploration of the idea of a ‘boomerang effect’, see A. Dirk Moses ‘Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms and the Holocaust’ in Mohammad Salama, Volker Max Langbehn (eds) German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2011), 72–92.

[14] See for example the important work by Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

[15] Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the “Native”’, Journal of Genocide Research 8(4), 2006, 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

[16] Shino Kinoshi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History.’ Australian Historical Studies 50 (3), 2019, 285–304.

[17] Miranda Johnson, ‘Writing Indigenous Histories Now’, Australian Historical Studies 45(3), 2014, 317.

[18] Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies 45 (3), 2014, 297–310.

[19] David A Gerber, ‘The Pathos of Exile: Old Lutheran Refugees in the United States and South Australia’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(3), 1984, 498-522; David Hilliard, ‘Unorthodox Christianity in South Australia: Was South Australia Really a Paradise of Dissent?’, History Australia, 2(2), 2005, 38:1–38:10.

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