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.
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.
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.
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