Denial in a Settler Society: the Australian Case

‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error’, the French scholar Ernest Renan once famously observed, ‘is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.’ It is undoubtedly true that all nations find it difficult to acknowledge and assimilate their pasts. Yet it can be argued that this phenomenon is especially pronounced in settler societies, such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples, and they have never experienced events of the kind that have forced other nations (such as postwar Germany) to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. In this article I examine Australia’s forgetting of its troubled history in regard to its indigenous people, and try to explain why it took the particular form it did.¹

In large part, but by no means wholly, I seek to understand this phenomenon by using Freud’s concept of denial or disavowal. Freud suggested that all human beings have a need to be innocent of a recognition of troubling matters and so we consciously or unconsciously adopt modes of defence that refuse to accept the implications of the reality we otherwise perceive. This means that denial is interpretive rather than literal in nature and always partial in that a human being both knows and does not know or rather knows but is unwilling or unable to acknowledge what they know. This paradoxical state of mind is integral to the phenomenon; indeed, it is probably only when this exists that the concept of denial or disavowal has any real value.²

CONTEMPORARY DENIAL

In many nations there are intriguing connections between denial in the remembering of a past – historical denial – and denial at the time of that past – contemporary denial. Australia is no exception. Indeed, the former has been especially marked in its case because of the nature of the latter.

Contemporary denial was the product of legal, moral and psychological forces that were largely the consequence of the peculiar terms upon which the Australian colonies were founded and the particular conditions in which the country was colonized. In planting colonies in Terra Australis from 1788 the British Crown simply claimed possession in the sense of both the right to sovereignty and rights in land. This was a departure from what British colonizers preferred to do, at least in regard to the latter. In North America, as historians such as Stuart Banner and Daniel K. Richter have demonstrated, they tended to assume that the best way to acquire possession was by negotiating with aboriginal peoples to purchase land, especially by means of a treaty. For various reasons this did not occur in the Australian case.³ Consequently, as a shrewd observer in New South Wales, Godfrey Charles Mundy, noted, the relationship between the British settlers and the Aboriginal people in regard to the former’s claim of possession was peculiar. ‘We hold it neither by inheritance, by purchase, nor by conquest, but by a sort of gradual eviction’, he remarked. ‘As our flocks and herds and population increase, and corresponding increase of space is required, the natural owners of the soil are thrust back without treaty, bargain or apology.’ Without the consent that purchase or a treaty implied, the settlers were left without a truly satisfactory way of legitimizing their claim of possession.⁴

This problem was aggravated by the fact that during the first fifty years of British colonization there was barely any occasion on which government at the imperial centre or on the colonial periphery was required to articulate what they thought was the basis of the British Crown’s claim to possession. However, beginning in the mid 1830s, government, and more especially settlers, found it necessary to try to legitimize their claims to possession as evangelical philanthropists raised their voices about the destruction and dispossession of aboriginal people. As a result, a visitor to the Australian colonies observed in 1845, the ‘right to Australia’ became ‘a sore subject with many of the British settlers’ and they strove ‘to satisfy their consciences...