Europeans and the Australian Environment: The Pioneer Legend

How have historians accounted for the role and place of early pioneers in shaping national mythology and national history? Has opinion changed across time and how might we account for these changes? 

In his article ‘The Pioneer Legend’ (1978), John Hirst describes the mythic pioneer as a powerful nationalistic figure in a comparable vein to the bushman. Emerging as a result of nationalism and the need to find new national hero-types in the 1880s and 1890s, the pioneer legend was concerned primarily with the ‘heroic’ struggle to possess a hostile, indifferent and alien landscape, which, according to Hirst, was ‘the central experience of European settlement in Australia.’ Hirst states that the legend celebrated attributes like ‘courage, enterprise, hard work and perseverance’, and usually referred to the white pastoralists and farmers who first settled the land. Furthermore, the legend also encouraged ‘reverence for the past’, promoted a ‘classless view of society’ and supported ‘individual rather than collective or state enterprise.’ Indeed, the democratic nature of the mythic pioneer was central to why it became such a powerful national hero-type; anybody who possessed valour and determination could identify with the pioneer. With all this in mind, it is little wonder why this ‘people’s legend’, as Hirst described it, became so influential in Australia.

A photograph of a settler family's hut in the Wielangta Forest, Tasmania (1800s). It was the tale of the settlers' 'heroic' struggles to tame a forbidding and strange land that contributed to the creation of the mythical pioneer narrative. (Source: Baird History and Genealogy)

Hirst also discusses the implications that the pioneer myth had on shaping national history. In particular, the legend obfuscated the convict stain that hung over and haunted the nation. According to Hirst, formal historians who adopted the pioneer legend, such as James Collier in his seminal text The Pastoral Age in Australasia (1911), ‘found it easy not to mention the convicts at all' by emphasising the settlement of land as the central theme in Australian history. Even to this day, the pioneer myth is encapsulated in new forms, such as in reconstructed pioneer villages: 'the buildings and their fittings strike the visitor with a sense of the pioneers' achievements, in making their homes or farms or businesses where nothing was before, and with a sense of the pioneers' hardship in contrast to his own life.' Just as the pioneer legend had a profound impact on the creation of national mythology, so too did it influence the making of Australian history (and continues to do so in different forms today).

Opinions about the pioneer legend have indeed changed since Hirst wrote his article in the 1970s. In a speech delivered by the Western Australian historian Tom Stannage in 1985, titled 'Western Australia's Heritage', he remains critical of the supposed 'democratic' and 'inclusive' nature of the pioneer myth that Hirst espoused. Stannage, talking of Western Australia, claims that the spirit of the pioneer excluded labourers, convicts, Irish servant girls, goldminers, urban dwellers, certain migrants and, above all, Aboriginal people. The most devastating part of all for Stannage is the fact that the legend seeks to avoid confronting the historical injustices committed against the indigenous people. It is for this reason that Stannage criticises the legend for 'manipulating people's ideas about history; in the last resort, justifying invasion and implicating us all in it.'

These changing views about the pioneer legend were, we might say, a product of the time. At roughly the same time as these views were emerging, there was a push for equality among minority groups, such as women, homosexuals and indigenous peoples. In Australia, issues concerning Aboriginal rights were gradually being brought into the limelight throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the Wave Hill walk-off in 1966 and the Commonwealth 1967 Referendum (which allowed Aboriginal people to be counted in the census) demonstrated. As such, Stannage's trenchant critique of the pioneer myth's exclusionary nature and its potentially problematic justification of invasion and dispossession fits in nicely with the various rights movements of the time.

Convict Lives: Changing Perceptions of Convict Women

How has the image of convict women changed across time?

The ways in which contemporaries, feminists and historians have perceived the role of convict women in Australia has undergone significant change over the past several decades. To begin, it should be noted that most contemporaries portrayed convict women in a most unfavourable light. In 1838, for example, the Molesworth Committee claimed that convict women were 'with scarcely an exception, drunken and abandoned prostitutes.' The free settler James Mudie, too, considered convict women ‘the lowest possible ... they all smoke, drink and in fact, to speak in plain language, I consider them all prostitutes.’ Moreover, a new settler wrote back to England with a critical view of the colonies, calling it 'little better than an extensive brothel' in which women were cast as servants and objects of sexual fulfilment. The picture painted of convict women was, indeed, far from flattering!

In Damned Whores and God’s Police, the Australian feminist Anne Summers takes this idea up and argues that women were moulded into this 'drunken and abandoned prostitute' stereotype as a result of oppressive patriarchal forces. Summers argues that women have traditionally been classed into one of two extreme categories: either moral women or damned whores. Summers blames ‘the traditional Judeo-Christian notion that all women could be categorized as being exclusively either good or evil’ for these absurdly stereotypical images of women that were successfully exported to Australia. Yet, as Summers goes on to point out, the situation in Australia was incredibly lopsided; most convict women were stereotyped into the ‘damned whore' category, which was reinforced by patriarchal forces within the colony. Regrettably, women had little hope of escaping this ‘damned whore’ stereotype; as Summers points out, the clasp of patriarchy used this degrading stereotype as a means of social control, and ensured that ‘female convicts were not allowed to change their ways.’

A picture of the Parramatta Female Factory taken in 1826. Female Factories, also known as prison workhouses, were one of Australia's responses to the management of convict women. According to Anne Summers, the Factory at Parramatta also served as a 'brothel' and 'marriage mart', thus reinforcing the prevalent 'whore' stereotype. (Source: National Library of Australia)

Summers’ argument that all convict women were doomed to be ‘damned whores’ because of the patriarchy has since been challenged by economic historians, however. In ‘Counting the Convicts’, the economic historian Deborah Oxley paints a very different picture of convict women to that of Summers, in which she argues that women, as well as men, brought with them skills that were invaluable to the economic growth of the colony. Here, it is important to note that the majority of convict women were in their late teens to early 30s (a perusal of the indents of thirty women aboard the Pyramus shows us this), meaning that the women being transported were ‘in the prime of their life, both in terms of productive capacity, and childbearing’ according to Oxley. The indents of the Pyramus also reveals the various employments for which these convict women had been trained, including housemaids, dairy maids, nursemaids, needleworkers, laundresses, and plain cooks.

Even though many contemporary accounts suggest otherwise, convict women brought with them varied and valuable—if underappreciated—skills in addition to their childbearing capacity, which Summers' one-dimensional view of convict women as 'damned whores' overlooks. Indeed, as Oxley rightly argues, women were as crucial to the upkeep and success of the colony as the men themselves.

Outpost of Empire: The Foundations of Australia

What are the competing arguments about the foundations of Australia?

After Great Britain lost the War of American Independence in 1783, the issue of what to do with Britain's unwanted convicts became increasingly acute. As Deborah Gare and David Ritter make clear, Britain's gaols were overflowing 'with thousands of men and women convicted for even petty crimes,' which prompted the need to seek out an alternative site to transport its  unwanted convicts. Indeed, many contemporaries have detailed the dire criminal circumstances in Britain at the time. For example, the prison reformer John Howard, in The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777), outlined how Britain's prisons were 'scantily supplied' with food and water and that the air within them was 'made poisonous to a more intense degree by the effluvia from the sick.' Lord Sydney, too, recognised that Britain's gaols were overflowing in his address to the Lord Commissioners of the Treasury in 1786, and—seeking an alternative to the American colonies—considered the 'remoteness' of New South Wales as 'peculiarly adapted to ... providing a remedy for the evils' in Britain's criminal sphere.

These contemporary accounts of Britain's prisons and the evident convict problem seem to support the idea that Australia was founded primarily as a dumping ground for convicts. However, this argument—albeit a popular one—is only one of several theories concerning the foundation of Australia. In Geoffrey Blainey’s seminal text, The Tyranny of Distance (1966), he critiqued the view that the English only sought to colonise Australia as a means of solving its convict problem. According to Blainey, Britain had 'prompter' and 'cheaper' solutions than sending its unwanted convicts to Australia, such as building more prisons at home or sending the convicts to Canada or islands in the West Indies—both of which were more viable options than Australia.

A view of the settlement in Norfolk Island from Flagstaff Hill. The supreme quality of the flax and timber to be found on Norfolk Island was just one of several reasons why the English began settling Australia. (Source: State Library of Tasmania)

In trying to explain why the English decided to settle Australia, Blainey suggests that a number of important economic and naval aspects were at play. Australia was considered to be imperative to the expansion of British naval power. English ships could, for instance, safely dock in Botany Bay  to unload catchments, undergo repairs, or lie idle during wartime. Furthermore, the superior quality of the timber and flax plants from Norfolk Island, for Blainey, were also attractive “selling points” for the English: ‘In that era Britain’s military strength and an increasing part of her commerce relied on seapower, and flax and ships’ timber were as vital to seapower as steel and oil are today.' In addition to the economic and military reasons that Blainey has outlined, P.J. Marshall also identifies a moral imperative for Britain to expand; that is, 'Empire was a vehicle by which a self-confident people exported their values and culture throughout the world.'

To sum up, it would be fair to say that the British chose to settle Australia not for any single reason but from the interplay of several: first, Australia was a perfectly suitable place to dump Britain's unwanted convicts; second, the flax and timber found on Norfolk Island could be used to bolster Britain's seapower and economy; and, third, expansion meant that Britain could more easily exert its influence throughout the world through the successful exportation of its culture and values. Yet Britain's imperial ambitions in the Pacific was not as peaceful as generally suggested, as P.J. Marshall rightfully identifies: '[there was] almost continuous conquest or violence overseas between 1783 and 1870'. Many injustices were, indeed, committed along the road to imperial expansion in Australia, which will be touched upon in a future blog post.

Australia and the Enlightenment: Views on the Inhabitants

How does Captain James Cook describe the inhabitants of New Holland? 

Portrait of Captain James Cook, the first European to locate and map the eastern coast of Australia in 1770. (Source: National Museum of Australia)

The accounts of early explorers had described the native inhabitants of the fabled 'Great Southern Land' in predominantly derogatory terms. In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon—touted as the first European to chance upon this mythical land—described the natives as ‘savage, cruel, black barbarians’ after they allegedly slew some sailors. In a similar vein, William Dampier—the first Englishman to explore the continent in the late 1600s—offered an even more scathing description of the natives, calling them ‘the miserablest people in the world.' The Enlightenment saw a gradual shift away from these early disparaging descriptions of the native inhabitants, however, and a move towards a more objective, reasoned and scientific analysis of their way of life. The journal of Captain James Cook embodies this latter approach.

In 1768, Cook was chosen to lead a great Pacific voyage to observe the transit of Venus (a rare astronomical event) and, secretly, to locate the mysterious Terra Australis and gather extensive information on the native inhabitants (among other matters). In his journal, Cook described the physical appearance of the inhabitants as ‘of a middle Stature straight bodied and slender-limbd [sic], their skins the Colour of Wood soot or of a dark Chocolate, their hair mostly black, some lank and others curled, they all wear it crop’d short, their Beards which are generally black they likewise crop short or singe off.’ Cook then proceeded to describe the natives’ values, customs and beliefs in great detail, and in the process rebuffed some of the conclusions made by Janszoon and Dampier.

In one instance, Cook rejected Janszoon’s view that the natives were a cruel and barbaric race: ‘I do not look upon them to be a Warlike People, on the Contrary I think them a timorous and inoffensive race, no ways inclinable to cruelty...’ In another, he positioned himself against Dampier and his view that the natives were the ‘miserablest people in the world’; rather, Cook took a utilitarian approach and evoked European ideas of the exotic 'noble savage' by claiming that ‘in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans ... they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and they have no superfluities...' Indeed, it is abundantly clear that Cook was a product of Enlightenment thinking. Rather than adhering to notions of European superiority like Janszoon and Dampier, he took an objective and scientific approach to the complex societal and cultural issues he and his crew were faced with in New Holland.