How Racism Marks Australia’s Landscape
Places that tell a story of colonialism
Beveridge
As I was driving to work one day, I found a part of the Hume Freeway closed off. Frustrated, I took a detour through Beveridge, a scenic country town on the outskirts of Melbourne. I had never driven through Beveridge before and I was pleasantly surprised at the beauty of its landscape. Though I was getting late for work, my impatience found an antidote in the serenity and the openness of the vast farmlands that flanked Merriang Road, which connects Beveridge to neighbouring townships.
Merriang is thought to be the Aboriginal term for stone chopper. Whereas Beveridge is named after a wealthy Scottish farming family who were among the early European settlers in Australia.
Such juxtaposition of indigenous and European names that mark Australia’s cities, towns, streets and freeways still convey the stories of racism and settler colonialism that created modern Australia.
‘Go away’
The vast tracts of open land that I drove past in Beveridge served as a tiny sample of the huge amount of land space that makes up Australia. A couple of centuries ago, all this land was up for grabs for free by European settlers as Kate Grenville vividly describes in her critically acclaimed novel Secret River.
Describing her protagonist William Thornhill’s attempt to lay claim to a hundred acres of what was believed to be an empty piece of land, Grenville writes:
…what marked a man’s claim was a rectangle of cleared and dug-over dirt and something growing that had not been there before.
Thornhill had even thought of a name for the place — Thornhill’s Point.
In Thornhill’s first encounter with the natives of that land, he couldn’t understand a word they said. However, there was one thing that he clearly understood from the hand gesture of one of the natives that concluded their brief, mutually incomprehensible, exchange:
In any language, anywhere, that movement of the hand said, Go away. Even a dog understood Go away when he saw it.
‘Cum-a-thunga’
In 1843, the Beveridge family sent one of their sons, Peter Beveridge, and his friend, James Kirby, to an area near the Murray River, which had not yet been occupied by European settlers. They took along with them a thousand head of cattle.
On their journey they met a few natives. Beveridge describes this initial encounter in his diary, which includes the below:
…they began swinging the boughs over and round their heads, and shouting ‘Cum-a-thunga, cum-a-thunga.’ We of course did not know what their meaning was by these antics, but we guessed that by it they meant we were welcome to their land, and we made them understand that we were highly pleased at their antics and quite delighted at the words ‘cum-a-thunga.’
Bruce Pascoe writes in his book, Dark Emu:
You would have to work hard to convince yourself, or the governor, that Aboriginal people were delighted to give away their land.
Unlike William Thornhill, Beveridge (mis)interpreted, perhaps deliberately, cum-a-thunga and the natives’ gestures to be an invitation to take their land, rather than a request to leave.
Despite Beveridge’s generous interpretation of the natives’ reaction at seeing them, problems soon started to arise as the new settlers started to deprive the natives from using their ancestral lands.
Andrew Beveridge, the brother of Peter Beveridge, was killed by the Wati Wati people for allegedly molesting their women. Kirby describes how the settlers dealt with the ‘blacks’ afterwards:
The blacks ran into the lake, but the shore shelved in so far that it was not deep enough for them to swim or dive, they thus became very good targets for us. A lot of these fellows never came near the hut again, nor did they attempt to kill a man or beast, no! they were very peaceable after this…Sir Robert [a Wati Wati man], for instance, never killed anyone after this, he also may have died.
The Voice to Parliament
Driving down Merriang Rd that day, marvelling at the beauty of the landscape, I was totally oblivious to the dark history of settler colonialism that was associated with the family that the town of Beveridge was named after.
The names of some places are quite overtly dark and morbid, such as, Poison Waterholes Creek and Murdering Island. Indigenous journalist Stan Grant briefly recounts the history of these places in his book Talking to My Country, and yes, their history is as horrific as their names suggest.
But, in most cases, the history of violence is hidden behind the familiar names of streets and suburbs which form part of our daily lives. I came to this realisation when I was listening to a talk by Wurundjeri Elder Tony Garvey one day where he said:
You’ve only gotta have a look around the CBD here on how much of a disgrace Melbourne is: King St, Queen St, Lonsdale, Batman Avenue — all racist.
And the indigenous people of Australia have to live through a daily reminder of the violent dispossession of their lands just due to the simple fact of how some places in Australia have been named.
In October 2023, Australia voted in a referendum about whether to amend the constitution to recognise the First Nations people of this country by instituting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — a proposed advisory body to provide advice to the government on matters affecting the Indigenous community. The vast majority of Australians voted No.
I will skip over the overtly racist arguments peddled by many in the No campaign. But in casual everyday conversations with friends and colleagues, I’ve heard things like What has happened in the past is terrible. But going forward it is wrong to say that the Indigenous people have a greater claim or connection to this country than the rest of us do.
In a way, that argument makes sense. However, it misses an important point. The Indigenous community faces a disproportionate amount of disadvantage in the different aspects of life than the rest of us do.
They are overrepresented in Australian prisons. They have the highest rate of deaths in custody (as a proportion of relevant population) compared to any other community.
They are the ones who have been dispossessed of their lands, not the rest of us. On the contrary, we now get to ‘own’ pieces of land which were not settled peacefully but were rather wrenched out of the hands of those who had lived here for around sixty thousand years.
They are the ones still suffering the violence of a history of colonisation.
Bruce Pascoe writes in Dark Emu that although Peter Beveridge wrote a dictionary of Aboriginal words in his retirement, he did not include the first Aboriginal words he had heard, cum-a-thunga, which Pascoe thinks, based on discussions with linguists of Aboriginal languages, could mean Get up and go away, not too different to what William Thornhill had understood from the hand gesture of the native that he had met.
Our collective choice to forget or simply ignore the continuing effects of Australia’s racist history on the Indigenous people is, unfortunately, akin to Beveridge’s omission of an important Wati Wati word from his dictionary. In both cases, perhaps, the omission is a necessity in order to allow us to create the imaginary of a modern, free and fair Australia.
