HIS201:The Uses and Abuses of History

Short 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. Classic empire consciousness, drawn from Roman legal categories (res nullius) and repurposed by colonial law as terra nullius, their legacy alive and wounding.

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.

Ned Kelly is a clear example of resistance. He was made into a “man-myth,” a white rebel outlaw who embodied resistance in the national imagination (Simmons, 2014, p. 417). He became the symbol of defiance, the underdog who stood against authority. His story was remembered and retold until it became legend.

The origins of Kelly’s story sang with working-class defiance. 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). When Kelly and his gang began robbing banks, they deliberately burned mortgage records, 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 reveal both the fire of the working class against unjust authority and the memory of Irish dispossession carried across seas. 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 the legend that grew after his death stripped away this justified class anger and turned him into something safer. Kelly was recast as the national rebel, the heroic outlaw who embodied toughness and independence for a 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 telling stories that soothes settler guilt by turning atrocity into folklore (p. 194).

I honour Kelly’s rage, his Irish-convict roots, 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 turned its violence on both cultures that threatened the ideals of the ruling class. It condemned the Irish poor as immoral and undeserving. It condemned First Nations people as savage and less than human. This is the pattern of the colonising class, the relentless work of Othering that Said (1978) identified, where entire peoples are dehumanised in order to justify domination.

This is where my own ancestry — Ukrainian and Irish — intersects with the same empire logics of erasure and vilification. The working-poor who were too often demonised as pagans, vagrants, labelled as gypsies or witches, and vilified by ruling class values, the press, and the invading cultures that sought to control them (Federici, 2004). The shame imposed by dominant narratives is not abstract. It is inherited, internalised, and devastating. Of course, I cannot speak for or even begin to imagine the First Nations Peoples of Australia and surrounding islands, nor the depth of what was endured through prison-colonies, slave-like labour camps, the White Australia Policy, forced assimilation and the devastating violence of the Stolen Generations. I want to honour First Nations resistance and resilience in the face of empire violence, while recognising how dominant narratives continue to punish generational wounding and earth-based values, rewarding assimilation into capitalist hierarchies and social-work standards that too often criminalise poverty. Marxism names it class consciousness; Lyotard (1984) calls it 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 nation story of Australia is told, where invasion is still recast as ‘settlement’ and ‘progress’ in classrooms, textbooks and national television. Narratives of nation affirm the values of the dominant culture, where profit, property and individual achievement are framed as the highest markers of worth. Anything outside those values is dismissed, marginalised or pathologised. 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. 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

Bradford, C. (2012). Instilling postcolonial nostalgias: Ned Kelly narratives for children. Australian Historical Studies, 43(2), 191–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2012.674545

Buchan, B., & Heath, M. (2006). Savagery and civilization: From terra nullius to the “tide of history.” Ethnicities, 6(1), 5–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23889334

Cowlishaw, G. (2006). On ‘getting it wrong’: Collateral damage in the history wars. Australian Historical Studies, 37(127), 181–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610608601210

Couzens, A. J. (2016). Cinematic visions of Australian colonial authority in Captain Thunderbolt (1953), Robbery Under Arms (1957) and Eureka Stockade (1949). Studies in Australasian Cinema, 10(2), 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2016.1170960

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.

Kelly, N. (2001). The Jerilderie letter. Black Inc. (Original work published 1879)

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)

McGrath, A. (Ed.). (1995). Contested ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown. Allen & Unwin.

McQuilton, J. (1979). The Kelly outbreak 1878–1880: The geographical dimension of social banditry. Melbourne University Press.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Seal, G. (2015). The outlaw legend: Ned Kelly in Australian culture (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316339461

Simmons, D. (2014). Our Ned: The makeup of myth. Antipodes, 28(2), 416–425. https://doi.org/10.13110/antipodes.28.2.0416

Thompson, E. P. (1963). The making of the English working class. Victor Gollancz.

Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

Williams, K. (2008). Critique: A historian said terra nullius was an invention — I’m a Blackfella lawyer who has serious concerns about his lack of understanding and knowledge of the common law. The Newcastle Law Review, 10(1), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.836614130050550