Aboriginal historian Barry Corr vividly investigates colonisation – but is less convincing on politics

Surveying the Wild Abyss, by Aboriginal historian Barry Corr, is a history of colonial invasion of the Nepean–Hawkesbury rivers (“Dhurabang”) and the Sydney Plain they enclose. Part one, just over half of the book, covers this. Then Corr turns his attention to Australian historical consciousness – what he refers to as “settler memory” and the “settler narrative”. In the second part, he points to resonance between the “settler narrative” and other texts. These are as far-flung as Gilgamesh, the poetry of Alexander Pope and John Milton, Charles Darwin (a visitor to the Dhurabang region in 1836) and Joseph Conrad (just a few of the writers he quotes). His mode is not historical, but intertextual. Review: Surveying the Wild Abyss: Unravelling settler memory by Barry Corr (New South) In a third section, Corr shares the writings that shaped him as a critic of Australia’s historical consciousness. What he calls “my tinker’s bag” contains quotes from philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacqueline Rose, philosopher-historians Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, and anthropologist William Stanner. The second half of the book is thus a blizzard of quotations, an autodidact’s exuberant display. ‘Impossible’ that Aboriginal anger will cool In part one’s historical narrative, Corr foreshadows part two’s critique of Australia’s colonial record. His account of the Parramatta Native Institution – where authorities attempted to school 37 Aboriginal children between 1814 and 1820 – includes this: The taking of children continued unabated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even in this century, although the devastating effects of the Stolen Generation are supposedly well known, and despite the Apology, the taking of children has been reinstitutionalised and touted as a social necessity, despite every indicator to the contrary. In passages such as this, Corr points to what he sees as the relentless continuities in Australians’ policies and historical consciousness. He portrays Australian thought and action as immune to historical revision – and not blessed by significant policy rethinking. “The stumbling block for decolonisation is the inability and unwillingness of the beneficiaries of settlement to recognise, acknowledge and address the nature and consequences of settlement,” he writes. In holding to this conviction, Corr is guided by his reading of the work of the late Patrick Wolfe, a noted historian of settler colonialism. Because “settler colonialism” is an enduring “structure”, Corr writes, its “hegemonic” mentality – the Settler Memory/Narrative – is unchanging. This Settler Narrative always has the same uneasy plot: a contemplation of horror, the repetitious recurring horror of frontier settlement; the ways in which the horror is recorded and the ways in which memory of the horror are [sic] erased and revealed. Corr addresses his non-Indigenous readers as enduringly complicit with creating and perpetuating the colonial “abyss”. He offers little to “those who suffer from the guilt of knowing that their privilege is built upon the suffering of others”. He warns that “apologies, statements of regret, no matter how well-felt, are only superficial moves to innocence”. (My emphasis added.) It is “impossible”, he writes, “that Aboriginal anger will cool and forgiveness be forthcoming”. These are generalisations about Australians’ historical awareness and feeling. In them, Corr presents Australians’ sense of the past as less contested, various and dynamic than – in my opinion – it actually is. However, he is a vivid historian of the colonisation of his home region – a “local” sage in the best sense. His history of his own Country draws on what seems a lifetime (he is in his eighties) of visiting sites, noting what is written – and not written – on memorials and tombstones. I can well believe him when he writes: “libraries have always been a home to me”. He has a penchant for the genealogy of the colonists who figured prominently in the first 50 years of his region’s colonisation. It would be rewarding to take his book on a walk or drive around places such as Richmond, Windsor, Parramatta, Penrith – savouring its concrete detail. (But why no index?) And his remarks on Patrick White’s novel, Voss, set in 19th-century Australia, and D.H.Lawrence’s 1923 semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo, make one hope for more “Aboriginalist” readings of Australia’s canonical works. So do his remarks on Arthur Streeton’s 1896 painting The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might. For example: White is completely wrong in portraying the appearance of a comet in the night sky as an omen of the destruction of the Aboriginal people. The comet is the eye of the Rainbow Serpent; it was not threatening the extinction of the Aboriginal people for holding Voss captive; rather it seeks out wrongdoers. Voss is killed because his arrogance had caused the deaths of innocent men. Arthur Streeton The purple noon’s transparent might. Arthur Streeton/Google Art Project Misreads a key critique of colonisation However, Surveying the Wild Abyss is less convincing as an intervention into the politics of post-referendum Australia. Corr’s subtitle is “unravelling settler memory”. Let’s take his verb literally. It evokes a disassembling of something tightly wound, a teasing out of the strands of an apparently unified thing, so we can see it is made of distinct elements. However, that is the opposite of Corr’s approach. The “settler memory/narrative”, in his formulations, is seamless, timeless and unreflexive. He is incurious about the history of the humanitarian critique of colonisation. His urge to essentialise the colonist leads him to misread one of the seminal critiques of settler colonial authority: the 1837 Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes. In the “Buxton Report” (named after its chair, Thomas Fowell Buxton), humanitarians fresh from political victory over the slave trade gathered horrifying evidence about the colonies of British settlement. Policies encouraging colonisation, Buxton argued, must include programs to protect native peoples from colonists’ violence, to reserve some land from dispossession, and to teach the natives “civilisation” (agriculture and Christian belief). Corr quotes the Buxton report saying “the speedy extinction of the Aborigines is inevitable”. However, he does not tell the reader this sentence is part of a passage in which Buxton summarised the assumptions and policies his committee was criticising. Deploring colonists’ self-serving fatalism, Buxton wrote: “The atrocity of such a sentiment is only surpassed by its impiety.” Unsympathetic to the humanitarian tradition Settler colonies are structures, but structures have histories: they are animated by struggle and vulnerable to contingency. In the colony known as Australia, struggles over strategies of protection, inclusion and betterment began with the refusal, by some critics of colonisation, to deny Aboriginal people a future. The ambition to amelioriate (or make a bad situation better) is manifest in policies of protection, assimilation and self-determination. Many historians see Buxton’s report as the foundation of an ameliorative policy tradition and an openness to critical history. In her 2021 book, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity, Zoe Laidlaw points to the debate within Buxton’s networks about what Aboriginal people had a right to expect of a genuinely civilised colonial authority. Sustaining the humanitarian tradition has made us all heirs to its injunction: if you are going to assume authority over the land and peoples of Australia, your goals must include the good of those whose lands you have occupied. This impulse is persistent. Actualised in policy and in critiques of policy, it remains a progressive tradition in Australian politics. The Uluru Statement From the Heart appealed to an enduring ideal: those who have inherited the fruits of colonisation are obliged to listen respectfully when the colonised say what they want. In October 2023, roughly 40% of Australian voters thought so highly of that idea, they voted to add the Voice to Australia’s constitution. Many Australians (including your reviewer) are empowered by the humanitarian tradition. Corr is profoundly unsympathetic to it, because it can give no satisfactory answer to what he considers “the basic question”: “What right did settler society have to intervene in Aboriginal life?” From the persistence of “Aboriginal disadvantage”, he infers that “assimilation, with all its deep racist roots, is a sleeping current in the Australians psyche”. Like many, he assumes “assimilation” was wholly negative, ignoring that some of the basic rights now exercised by Indigenous Australians – including the right to vote, to litigate against racial discrimination and to receive welfare payments – were goals of that policy. Corr is correct to say “the Native Title Act effectively legitimated freehold title”. But that law did a lot more than tighten “the settler stranglehold on Country”. For many Indigenous Australians whose Country is far from Corr’s, the laws of land rights and native title are the basis of an enormous land and sea estate, whose future no one can confidently predict. Fatalism as political weakness That settler colonial amelioration always falls short is not a reason to abandon it as one of the nation’s essential purposes. If fatalism was an ethical dead end for the British authorities targeted by Buxton, it is no less a political weakness among critics of the settler colony. Other Australians who care about “Indigenous affairs” will be less at odds with Corr than I find myself. The publisher has included short essays by historian Tom Griffiths and Justin Clemens in Corr’s book. For Clemens, Surveying the Wild Abyss is a “masterpiece”. He finds “moral authority” in Corr’s depiction of the settlers’ “abyssal desperation, all the way up to the recurrent and pitiless state assaults that continue today”. Griffiths admires Surveying the Wild Abyss as “not history, philosophy or poetry, yet it is all of these”. His generous invitation acknowledges the book “may confound some readers but will captivate many others”.