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  • Securing Possession:A New Way of Understanding the Past
  • David Day (bio)

From Karl Marx to Jared Diamond, historians have used different ways to explain the history of the world. Each one has contributed something to our understanding of the past. Here I propose a new approach, which looks at the ways in which human affairs have been shaped by the constant movement of peoples onto lands occupied by others, and the subsequent attempts of these newcomers, often extending over centuries, to make those lands their own.

Although hitherto largely unexamined in any theoretical way, the process of claiming the exclusive possession of a particular territory has shaped human history. Ancient peoples left their old lands and moved to new territories or expanded their existing realms by encompassing neighboring or more distant lands into their own. The initial claim of ownership was the beginning of a prolonged process, as the supplanting society attempted over time to demonstrate in myriad ways that its claim of ownership was superior to all competing claims.

It is the examination of this prolonged process, and its many manifestations, that has particularly interested me for the last twenty years or so. It was during the mid-1980s that I first began to explore the concept of a supplanting society. I was writing a history of wartime Anglo-Australian relations (later published as The Politics of War, HarperCollins, 2003), and I was struck by the very different reactions of Australians and Britons to the prospect of being invaded. Wartime Australian politicians seemed convinced that their nation could not survive a Japanese invasion. The arrival of Japanese forces, in their view, would mark the end of the 150-year British occupation of that continent. In contrast, British political and military leaders seemed confident that a German invasion of the British Isles would not mean the end of Britain, which could be expected to survive a German occupation as it had survived other invasions in the past, albeit being changed to some extent in the process.

These different attitudes raised interesting questions. British Australians did not feel confident about having a secure hold on the continent that they had first occupied in 1788. Did a certain amount of time have to pass before a supplanting society felt secure? What did a supplanting society have to do to feel secure in a territory with prior owners?


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From Charles Henry Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland: An Eight Years' Experience in the Above Colony, with Some Account of Polynesian Labour (London, 1872).

Exploring the answer to the first question provided me with a new way of looking at Australian history. I now saw it as the story of a society with a small population trying to secure its claim on an expansive continent occupied by indigenous people who had been there for many thousands of years, and which was uncomfortably close to several societies with much greater populations. British Australians have wrestled with this predicament for more than two centuries, and it continues to shape their history.

When I was a visiting professor at University College Dublin in 1993, I used the notion of supplanting societies as the central concept in the lectures I prepared for the overview course on Australian history. Those lectures then became the basis for a history of Australia that I wrote while still in Dublin. The book was shaped by the many parallels between the Australian and Irish experiences, which became clear to me during the three years I lived with my family in Ireland.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found that the apparently charitable view of the Irish toward the people of Third World countries was matched by a very rigid view as to what made a person Irish. In the case of a handful of Vietnamese refugees who had been given sanctuary in Ireland during the 1980s, their Catholicism was not deemed sufficient for them to be accepted as Irish. Indeed, I was told by one student that the refugees and their descendants would "never" be Irish.

I had a related experience when searching for my family roots in the border town of Carrickmacross, only to...

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