HIS201:The Uses and Abuses of History

Personal Reflection

“Terra nullius was not a mistake; it was a calculated act of erasure” (Williams, 2008, p. 40). These words anchor my understanding. Colonial law did not fail to see. It chose to dehumanise and it chose to legitimise violence through doctrine dressed as moral authority. Buchan and Heath (2006) argue that the concept of terra nullius “recast Aboriginal land as uninhabited,” not because no one was there, but because acknowledging First Nations Peoples’ sovereignty would have shattered the very foundations of British imperial legitimacy (p. 10). It was never a legal error; it was a strategy of domination. The law erased land-based kinship and tens of thousands of years of custodianship. It called the sacred savagery, so theft could be excused. Domination was blessed as divine right. Derived from the Roman legal category res nullius and repurposed by colonial law as terra nullius, this doctrine reveals the enduring, wounding legacy of empire. Language as violence.

Williams (2008), writing from a Black legal perspective, uses biting irony to expose the absurdity: “Brother, we are now British citizens,” he writes of Cook’s flag-planting (p. 43). This moment is not a quaint tale of nation-making but the unveiling of a violent fiction, a symbolic act in which fabricated belonging is announced with ceremony and the brutality beneath is concealed. Williams’ words show me that history was not just written by the violent victors but carefully fabricated by them, polished into myth, curated into national pride.

In this light, not all narratives of pride are equal. Australia’s storytelling selectivity reveals how whiteness and hierarchy shape how forms of resistance are remembered. Terra nullius erased First Nations sovereignty, while stories like Ned Kelly’s were elevated as symbols of defiance that fit within a settler frame. Kelly became the “man-myth,” a white rebel outlaw who embodied working-class resistance in the national imagination (Simmons, 2014, p. 417). He was remembered as the underdog who stood against authority, his story retold until it became legend. Yet over time the legend was stripped of class and culture. The Irish convict realities, the poverty, the protest against landlords and police corruption were quieted. What was once collective defiance against empire’s hierarchy became mythologised as violent spectacle. The burning of mortgages, the cries for justice, the fight against class domination were reduced to outlaw folklore.

Born in 1854 to Irish parents, Kelly grew up in poverty on the margins of settler society. His father was a transported convict, his mother an Irish immigrant who raised her family under constant police scrutiny. Like many Irish in colonial Victoria, the Kellys were branded as criminal by association. Police harassment was routine, and their poverty placed them at the bottom of a rigid settler hierarchy (McQuilton, 1979). Although the colony imagined itself as a new egalitarian society, free from Britain’s old class divisions, it quickly reproduced them in law, labour, and land. After the violent clash at Stringybark Creek in 1878, the colonial government declared Kelly and his gang outlaws. Only then did they begin robbing banks, deliberately burning mortgage records in a symbolic act of resistance against the landlords and creditors who held small farmers in crushing debt (Seal, 2015). In his Jerilderie Letter, Kelly (1879/2001) condemned the colonial police as “a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat-headed big-bellied magpie-legged narrow-hipped splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords” (p. 7). His words expose how colonial authority in Australia reproduced the class hierarchies of Britain and Ireland, where power and privilege were inherited rather than earned. By naming the police as “sons” of bailiffs and landlords, Kelly evokes the continuity of class oppression, those who once enforced dispossession at home now uphold it in the colony. The insult becomes political, a recognition that empire exported its social order and transformed the colony into a mirror of the very injustices it claimed to escape. At Glenrowan in 1880, Kelly’s homemade iron armour became a lasting symbol of defiance, a poor man’s invention that stood against the firepower of empire. Yet as his body was executed and his legend set loose, the meaning of that defiance was gradually rewritten. What began as a class protest against inherited power was absorbed into the settler imagination as a story of national identity.

The legend that grew after his death stripped away this justified class anger and turned him into something safer, or rather radicalised the violence againust authority without the context of why. Kelly was recast as the national rebel, the heroic outlaw who embodied toughness and independence for a new settler nation trying to imagine itself (Simmons, 2014). In this story, his defiance was celebrated while the far more sustained resistance of First Nations people was silenced and shamed to unimaginable extremes. First Nations defiance was never granted the status of heroism. Instead it was framed as chaos, savagery, disorder. Acts of survival were criminalised and widely pathologised by psychologists and anthropologists who branded them as madness, primitivism and proof of racial inferiority (McGrath, 1995). Bradford (2012) calls this “postcolonial nostalgia,” a way of storytelling that turns atrocity into folklore to soothe the national conscience of settler identity.

Yet even this framing risks collapsing the complex hierarchies within so-called “settler” identity itself. Across the twentieth century, two world wars and a series of international conflicts displaced millions, carrying inherited traumas of famine, dispossession, loss and labour exploitation into the colonial landscape. While some arrived with wealth and entitlement, many others entered under working-poor conditions and assimilationist laws that demanded silence of difference. Within “white Australia,” even whiteness was tiered, bound to language, land ownership and access to cultural capital. These silences formed the quiet backdrop to national mythmaking, where hardship was honoured only when it served the settler story and reflected the values of those already in power.

I honour Kelly’s rage, his Irish-convict realities, his ancestors who endured centuries of colonisation, and his refusal to bow to a system that criminalised poverty and punished the working class for surviving. But I also see how the national story elevated his rebellion while the sovereignty of Aboriginal warriors was ruthlessly inverted. The truth is that empire did not strike out of fear but out of design. It turned its violence on cultures it sought to dominate, weaponising language, religion and law to legitimise control. It condemned the Irish and English poor as immoral and undeserving. It condemned First Nations people as savage, uncivilised and in need of government discipline. This is the pattern of the colonising class, the relentless work of Othering that Said (1978) identified, where entire peoples are dehumanised to rationalise conquest and exploitation.

This is where my own ancestry, Ukrainian and Irish, intersects with these same imperial logics of erasure and vilification. Both cultures share long histories of being demonised as pagan or peasant, labelled as gypsy or witch, condemned by ruling-class values and by invading forces that sought to break their communal and earth-based ways of life. Ireland and Ukraine each endured colonial regimes that enforced obedience through dispossession and policies of widespread famine, then blamed the “peasants” for their own suffering. The shame imposed by these narratives is not abstract. It is inherited, internalised and devastating. These histories live in me. However, I now exist as a white woman on unceded land, benefiting from the same imperial logic that once displaced them. This awareness shapes my understanding of loss and survival under empire, yet to read ethically on this land I must recognise that my experience of displacement and assimilation does not mirror that of First Nations peoples. It teaches me about empire’s reach but not about belonging to Country. My role is to stay curious about how the original custodians of this land tell their stories, beliefs and worldviews, without applying my own lens of relation or seeking reflection of my pain. To acknowledge my lineage is not to centre it but to signal my blind spots, to notice where my assumptions are shaped by empire and where humility must guide interpretation. This lived awareness explains why my analysis turns toward historical systems of power rather than individual morality.

Of course, I cannot speak for, nor begin to imagine, the First Nations Peoples of Australia and surrounding islands, or the depth of what was endured through prison colonies, slave-like labour camps, the White Australia Policy and the devastating violence of the Stolen Generations — tactics of genocide. I want to honour First Nations resistance and resilience in the face of empire’s violence, while recognising that dominant narratives and economic systems still punish earth-based ways of life. They reward assimilation into capitalist hierarchies and institutional standards that continue to criminalise poverty. Lyotard (1984) calls this the power of “grand narratives.” These are the stories empire tells to justify itself. They decide who belongs and who does not, whose resistance is mythologised and whose is erased, whose suffering is remembered and whose is branded as weakness or disorder.

Today, the logic of empire endures in how the national story of Australia is told, where invasion is still recast as “settlement” and “progress” in classrooms, textbooks and national television. In reality, these “settler” decisions and laws came from the ruling class, not from the collective of people racialised as white. As Marx observed, “the ruling ideas of a nation are nothing more than the ideas of its ruling class” (Marx & Engels, 1846/1970, p. 64). Whiteness, a political invention of empire rather than an inherent identity, promised belonging and superiority to some while enforcing dispossession, assimilation and exploitation on others. It developed as an organising story of empire, dividing people into categories of value to justify conquest, slavery and extraction. The spread of Roman “Christian” civilisation across Celtic and Slavic lands is one example of how empire first turned its violence inward, erasing Indigenous European languages and earth-based traditions. Pre-existing social structures, sacred sites, beliefs and practices were forcefully demonised as pagan, peasant and backward by the standards of the dominant, invading culture. Celtic descendants spoke of how public conformity to the dominant religion became a matter of survival, while older rituals and songs continued in private or blended with Christian practice. In quiet gatherings, fragments of language, prayer and melody were preserved as acts of remembrance that defied erasure. Across Ireland, Scotland and Wales, many pre-Christian customs were absorbed into saint festivals, seasonal celebrations and oral traditions that carried ancestral cosmologies in disguised form (Hutton, 1991; Ó Giolláin, 2000).

These patterns of storytelling and selective remembrance extend beyond the colony’s borders. With this context, the rigid binary of “white settlers” versus “people of colour” oversimplifies history. It collapses the diverse cultures and geographies that existed before empire into a false divide between the civilised and the uncivilised, the oppressors and the oppressed. By ignoring the long histories of war, famine, and displacement policies that shaped migration and belonging, such framings erase the complex realities of survival, resistance and enforced conformity within the class hierarchies of empire. Critiques of post-colonial binaries reveal how this framing can reproduce the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. As King (1990) and Said (1978) both suggest, defining identity through opposition to the coloniser risks keeping colonial logic intact. Said (1978) called this a “complex dialectic of reinforcement” where criticism reproduces the binaries it claims to deconstruct (p.12). Phillips and Archer-Lean (2019) similarly argue that the post-colonial lens often privileges Eurocentric categories of difference rather than unsettling them. The danger lies in treating “white” and “non-white” as stable, homogenous positions rather than as fluid identities shaped by class, geography and power. Empire thrived on these simplifications, dividing communities to secure control. A decolonial approach must therefore move beyond the binary altogether, tracing how capitalism, race and hierarchy co-produced the myths through which empire still governs belonging. While racial prejudice and stereotypes remains rife in Australian media and public discourse, class continues to shape how oppression is lived and remembered across all groups. The poorest within every culture carry the heaviest weight of empire’s design. Class determines who toils, who is deemed worthy of backbreaking labour, and who profits and remains well fed. It intersects with race, gender and culture, compounding disadvantage while protecting those closest to power. Yet class analysis is often the first to be erased from national conversations about justice.

Narratives of nation continue to reproduce the Enlightenment story of progress and civilisation, where the accumulation of property, profit and individual achievement are upheld as the primary measures of human worth. Values that fall outside this framework are consequently dismissed, marginalised, or pathologised (Foucault, 1977). The same logic was turned against the working poor from the first fleets. Those on the lowest rung of empire’s economy were told their suffering was divinely ordained. They were branded immoral, unevolved and inferior to those who possessed land, capital, and inherited access to resources denied to them. Long has empire insisted the exploited deserved their fate.

History reveals that an empire which dispossessed its own poor could never recognise kinship, reciprocity or the sacred values of other cultures. Thompson (1963) showed how the British elite criminalised its rural poor, outlawing gleaning, foraging and hunting in order to enforce land ownership and control, stripping communities of their ancient rights and treating them as cattle. Couzens (2016) reveals how this ideology travelled into Australian cinema, where both land and people were framed as wild and in need of conquest. To the imperial mind, those without capital or property or sanctioned control were always considered less-than.

Overall, the erasure of First Nations people was made possible because empire had already severed its own cultures from kinship with earth, from communal life and from relational ways of being. Blind to what it had lost, it erased what it could not comprehend. This is why historians must be relentless in their devotion to socio-cultural context, because empire succeeded not by telling obvious lies but by disguising ideology as law, violence as progress and conquest as common sense. History must become more than memory; it must become moral clarity. As Trouillot (1995) reminds us, silence is never neutral. Silence is an active force. If we do not name the fictions, if we do not expose the fabrications, then we risk repeating them.

References

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