Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia

A thematic history of Australia from the invasion to the present day. Race is placed at the centre of the Australian story and is linked to the broader narrative of possession, dispossession and proprietorship. Aboriginal Studies.

How does a state acquire proprietorship over a territory, especially if there are people living there already? David Day makes the case that this has been the central political issue in Australia’s history, and it is a question that underlies many contemporary and historical national struggles, from the wars in Palestine and Bosnia to Aboriginal demands in Canada today.
Day’s history reveals many facts of Australian history that I was unaware of, starting with the fact that Europeans searched for it for centuries before Cook confirmed its existence as a continent in the 1770s. It seems astonishing that with sailing expeditions from the 1400s, and occasional contact, that it should take so long, but explorers rarely ventured far into the vast and dangerous southern seas. Having made the discovery, they saw little profit in establishing a remote sea port. The main interest of Europeans was to keep their rivals from benefitting, disregarding the fact that the land was already occupied. Hence the decision to deport convicts to establish a colonial presence.
But one small colony cannot establish a right of proprietorship over a continent. Day lays out the principles of ownership by discovery, conquest, occupancy or moral right, and says that Britain and Australia have gone through all of these in their claims to be lawful owners of the continent. Often these have come into conflict. The 200-year campaign to extend European occupancy, which still exists mainly in a few concentrated areas around the periphery, conflicts with Aboriginal ownership. Australian policies have denied Aboriginal moral rights by saying that Aboriginal people had no recognized property and were a degenerate, declining population anyway. Settlers reinforced this by driving them off their lands, often violently and sometimes through deliberate massacre as late as the middle of the twentieth century.
By portraying European and especially British cultures as superior, Britain and Australia attempted to justify the moral claim to ownership. To strengthen this claim, Australia tightly restricted immigration, particularly from Asian and southern European countries until the end of the second world war. This was critical to prevent nearby Asians from establishing an occupancy claim to parts of the continent where they had long had trading contacts and small settlements. Australia’s restrictive immigration policy, however, conflicted with the need to populate and occupy vast territories, so much of its foreign policy was designed to encourage British, northern European and white American immigration.
This overt racism broke down in the face of the need to expand population by the mid-twentieth century, when the shifting interests of both Britain and the USA turned away from the remote, expensive and unproductive colony that no longer fit geopolitical priorities. Needing to attract more foreign investment to support industrial development in a new economy, racial discrimination became harder to justify, and Australian policies shifted. A new economic boom after WWII was financed by growing Asian countries and their desirable markets, so Australia now identifies as an Asian country. In keeping with this more liberal approach is a growing acceptance of multiculturalism. Ironically, a new identification with Aboriginal history and peoples is now used to support a continued claim to proprietorship in the face of new interest by China, Japan and Indonesia. Conceding actual rights to land through a treaty with Aboriginal peoples has proven difficult, however, and a new White Australia movement is pushing the Conservative Party to anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal policies.
Day tells a history of Australia that is soundly researched and academically based, but interesting and readable. While the focus is on government policy and personalities, he fills it in with descriptions of the living conditions, women’s and workers’ movements, and with the story of Aboriginal resistance to colonialism. The book is well written and insightful, and leads to a more critical view of our own Canadian colonialism, where we have used similar themes in justifying the Franco-British presence and protecting it against territorial Americans. pp. 453 #1020 ISBN 10: 0732279984 ISBN 13: 9780732279981