by Dr Robyn Smith
CONTENT WARNING: THIS PIECE CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE AND DESCRIPTIONS. IT INCLUDES THE NAMES AND IMAGES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE WHO ARE DECEASED.
Twelve months ago, then-police commissioner Michael Murphy made a widely publicised and long overdue apology to Aboriginal people for the police’s treatment of and attitude to them.
Predictably, the response was polarised.
“You don’t apologise to the enemy,” growled a former member of an Australian constabulary, ‘enemy’ being the language of war.
Later in the month, the Finocchiaro Government was swept to victory on a tough-on-crime platform.
It set to work on a ‘journey of change’ that was more reminiscent of the arcadian populism that followed self-government than it was innovative.
In its editorial of August 22 1997, the NT News declared: “If you want to be leader of the CLP, you probably have to be more proficient in black-bashing than political philosophy.”
So it was in August 2024, that the NT went back to the future.
Not long after, Murphy was gone, the tough-on-crime journey of change played out in the Assembly, two Aboriginal men died in police custody within a fortnight, transport and housing inspectors were armed, hate speech restrictions were watered down, hygiene police were introduced and, from next month, civilians can legally arm themselves with pepper spray.
The 2025 budget was tweaked to accommodate all this, including more police, more correctional officers and more prisons.
The possibilities are boundless.
This tough-on-crime approach is otherwise known as punching down, one of the few obligation-free gifts conferred on the antipodeans by those gracing the British throne.
A defining feature of that culture is its propensity for locking up irritants, the prerequisite of which is that they must be from the lower classes.
Reputationally risk-averse upper-class families packed their irritants off to Oxford or the House of Lords, where they engineered laws to enrich their own engorged estates.
Thus, there was a tough-on-crime genetic predisposition when its penal colonies were established on Terra Australis.
Also conferred on the antipodeans by those gracing the British throne was their class structure, another device engineered to enrich engorged estates by converting disposable irritants – convicts, for example – into economic assets.
The same rationale was employed by those representing their lords and masters while they shot their way across Australia’s vast frontier, taking the land for enrichment of the same estates.
For Aboriginal people, if the price wasn’t murder, it was capture for conversion into an economic asset.
This they called making people ‘quiet and useful’.
Unpaid, of course, but it wasn’t slavery. Australia didn’t have slavery, we’re told, because it wasn’t called slavery.
The State Library of Queensland’s Marg Powell explained that “blackbirding was a term used by Europeans to soften its real meaning…it refers to…slave traders who enticed South Sea Islanders to board their ships and take them to a land where they were enslaved on plantations…”
Blackbirding on the Queensland cane fields, Cairns 1890. Image: State Library of Queensland.
Enslavement applied on pastoral stations that quickly subsumed the lands of northern Australia, as was so well captured in Ted Egan’s Gurindji Blues.
Arbitrary justice was the love child of the penal gene, and it was enthusiastically embraced by the pastoralism sector.
Criminality became the preferred tool when massacres and submission to economic conversion failed.
Undated photograph: ‘Men in chains – caught in the act of killing an animal – wading in river’.
Image: Frank Bunney Collection, State Library of Western Australia.
WA historian Chris Owen said the men in this photograph were probably from the North Kimberley region where they were “arrested as a group for alleged ‘cattle killing’, usually regardless of any individual responsible identified, any warrant, any evidence or any rules of law.
“They would be marched out of their country (to get them away from the valuable cattle) for hundreds of kilometres to the nearest town (Derby, Wyndham) and tried in groups of 10 (after being coached to plead guilty) and sentenced to up to two years in prison.
“Many men spent a life going in and out of prison – imprisoned on grounds that were barely, if at all, legal.”
Independent Member for Mulka Yingiya Guyula recalled his grandfather’s father-in-law, who was murdered by stockmen in Arnhem Land near Mirrngatja.
The stockmen, he said, were “…hunting someone who had stolen cattle and this is why they had come looking to kill someone for payback.
“Many Yolngu walked through this area, on our country, and maybe some cattle passed their paths.
“This was normal hunting for our people. It was not a crime.”
But there were two laws, and one, by nothing more than dint of declaration, had supremacy.
Women, of course, were at the bottom of the heap.
The much-celebrated Frank Hann, whose exploits criss-crossed from the Queensland Gulf country to the VRD and Kimberley, was no exception.
“Mrs Creaghe’s comment regarding ‘the usual method’ of treating Aboriginal women was borne out by Hann’s own diary on 11 October 1895 when he noted that he had ‘chained up’ a ‘gin’ named Dora at Lawn Hill because she ‘would not do as I wished’,” wrote his biographer GC Bolton.
Portrait of Frank Hann and his ‘boy’ Talbot, c1906.
Image: State Library of South Australia.
Creaghe also wrote: “Mr [Bob] Shadforth put a rope round the gin’s neck & dragged her along on foot, he was riding. This seems to be the usual method [of abducting women].”
Australia’s famous fair go, then, was very selectively applied.
The biological parents of the penal gene are Wealth and Class, both of which were conditioned by the social imperative that was ‘education’ enveloped by eugenics.
Eugenics is a discredited theory built on comprehensive ignorance, convenience and a fanciful racial hierarchy dominated by white superiority.
There was something of an each-way bet involved: one was that black races would die out naturally because of their inherent inferiority; another was that they could be bleached out by interbreeding.
Either way, eugenic ideology was relentlessly pursued during the colonisation of Australia and the policies of colonialism that followed—such as making people quiet and useful.
Australia had ‘training’ institutions designed to serve that purpose.
They were populated with stolen children and administered by government men or men of the cloth.
Stolen, institutionalised and being trained for a life in the service of white masters,
which is why the handwriting on this image specifies strength. Image: Bringing them Home report, 1997.
The practice was put plainly in an address at the AIATSIS Summit on 4 June.
“My name is Pat Anderson. I am an Alyawarre woman from the Northern Territory.
“I am of Stolen Generations heritage – my mother was taken from her family in desert country and raised in the Kahlin compound in Darwin, where she was trained not for education, but for servitude.”
Servitude dressed up as welfare and benevolence was recorded for posterity over multiple generations.
The original caption on this photograph read: ‘Boy with Leila Gawthorne, Roebourne WA c1900’. The State Library of WA, which holds it, records this information: ‘Nurse boy Nor West’ and that the photograph is by AJ Thomas.
Eugenics didn’t end with federation and, in fact, endured well beyond it.
The White Australia Policy was one of the earliest legislative triumphs of the newly minted Australian nation and notwithstanding it was abandoned in the mid-1970s, some remain firmly wedded to it.
The country went to a referendum in 1967 to decide whether its original citizens (a) ought to be counted in the population; and (b) ought to be governed by central policy from Canberra.
Australia overwhelmingly said yes.
A referendum in 2022 asking whether the same people ought to be given a voice yielded the opposite result when Australia overwhelmingly said no.
The 2025 federal election soon followed.
The latter two, for different reasons, were muddied by claims of ‘racial privilege’ and separatism that would cause a ‘racial divide’, which was undesirable.
In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal people comprise about 30 per cent of the population and about 87 per cent of prisoners.
This is not a coincidence; this is the penal gene hard at work.
On the anniversary of Commissioner Murphy’s apology to Aboriginal people, it is timely to reflect on the two-tiered system that has endured in Australia since the first fleeters set foot on the east coast in 1788.
The penal gene with which they were armed gave us today’s tough-on-crime mindset.
The most vulnerable – let’s call them colonial irritants – were and remain the most targeted and the least protected.
Politicians live in mortal fear of soft-on-crime accusations leading to electoral oblivion.
We – along with fellow imperial nations New Zealand, England and Wales – have one of the lowest minimum ages of criminal responsibility in the world.
This is not a coincidence.
In the face of overwhelming evidence about a 10-year-old’s lack of capacity to conceive of and execute a criminal modus operandi, we have set the minimum age of criminal responsibility at 10 because we’re tough on crime.
Colonial genetics course through our nation’s veins.
Colonial genetics guaranteed that the apparently distasteful ‘racial divide’ defined Australia.
It’s called racial privilege.
If you haven’t noticed, it’s because you’re saturated in it.
If you haven’t noticed, you could be the one flinging around epithets like ‘the enemy’.
Dr Robyn Smith is a lecturer in colonial history at Charles Darwin University and is a Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle, a PhD (Political History), Master of Cultural Heritage and Bachelor of Arts (Journalism & Anthropology). She is well written on the history, heritage and politics of the Northern Territory. Her latest book, Licence to Kill: Massacre Men of Australia’s North, was published earlier this year.