The other day, sauntering into Daunt Books in London, I chanced upon former prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent single-volume history (Opens in new window) of Australia. The cover jacket was captivating. A good old harbour landscape, light azure skies, and sepia-toned land. Impulsively, I picked it.
A candid confession is due here. Little did I know that the history of the Antipodes would be so revealing. By exploring the past of Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land, one gets a finer sense of the famed island. Where the sun is bright, and everyone has “a fair go”. It was a pleasant revelation. Australia’s past and present are deeply interwoven with the world. As Abbott puts it, the three pegs of modern Australia are “an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and its immigrant character”.
For an outlander like me, Australian history has much to offer. I suspect it is not different for foreign interlocutors vying to win Canberra’s affection. Mutual trust lies in uncovering our shared stories.
The early part of the book has encounters between Europeans and the Aboriginal ancients. In 1770, after meeting Indigenous Australians for the first time, the British mariner Captain James Cook wrote in his journal, “the Natives of New Holland … may appear … to be the most wretched people on Earth … in reality they are far … happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted … not only with the superfluous but with the necessary conveniences … they live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition.”
Of course, reality was not always so neat. Complications would spring soon. For example, when pastoralists and settlers moved into the Tasmanian interior, Indigenous Australians pushed back. Abbott tells that varying degrees of hostility, suspicion, curiosity, and amiability would define the relationship between the Europeans and Aboriginal people for decades to come.
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