Correspondence

More “Cultural Genocide”?

SIR: Stephanie Jarrett (“Aboriginal Liberation Through Integration”, April 2013) decries “The nation’s policies of encouraging separation, self-determination and cultural continuity”. In the face of the hysteria with which the “Stolen Generation” myth was rammed down our throats, why wouldn’t a nation accused of genocide recoil from any policy which might weaken any aspect of traditional culture?

“Greater commitment is needed to bring about cultural changes”, Ms Jarrett tells us. No, Ms Jarrett. We have been there and done that and our purest motives have been grotesquely distorted to such an extent that we have been seriously accused of genocide. The children that were saved from the very circumstances which Ms Jarrett now deplores are now classed as “stolen”. And the lie persists. After Keith Windschuttle’s expose of the fabrication of the “Stolen Generation”, there is no excuse for anyone in continuing to peddle it: apart from pandering politicians, that is, apologising on our behalf for something that didn’t happen.

Ms Jarrett tells us that “whatever our guilt” we must be guided by certain principles, which she sets out with admirable candour. Given our explicitly assumed “guilt”, her remedies are nothing more than a blueprint for “cultural genocide”, as we have been taught to understand the meaning of that term.

Frank Pulsford
Aspley, Qld

Squatters and Selectors

SIR: Good on Robert Murray for questioning the received image of the “squatters” and continued use of the term (Letters, May 2013). The image includes connotations of illegitimate political power and wealth, and free or very cheap land holdings. I would like to add to Murray’s evidence from far western New South Wales, known since 1884 as the Western Division. It is the region that some of Murray’s Victorian pastoral lessees fled to (he calls it “outback Riverina”) after being driven out by government-supported selectors.

White settlement began here later (in the 1840s and 1850s) than in the more salubrious humid eastern regions, by which time legislators and land bureaucrats were getting their act together about white legal title. Few early settlers occupied land without legal title, or if they did, they were waiting to get it, and pay the government (the Crown) for it, at first by tendering, often a difficult and expensive process. One young man travelled east from Adelaide with his new bride to claim land on Lake Victoria near present-day Wentworth, but after waiting months for legal title they returned to South Australia. In addition to successful tendering, lease rentals were an important source of New South Wales government revenue.

Legal title was desired in order to assert rights as against other land-seekers, but later, title-holders wanted better title than a short-term lease so that they could borrow to finance their land use and occupation. But from the earliest times of white occupation, regardless of the length of their legal title (twelve years renewable after 1842, then five years renewable after 1861) they bought and sold on a private market.

Sir John Robertson’s famous legislation of 1861 introduced “selectors” to the whole of New South Wales. They could walk onto any area of a lessee’s land (except any freeholded area) and claim, “squat on” if you like, up to 640 acres (more later). This was no great threat to those already in the Western Division, 640 acres being too small for a living by grazing in this low-rainfall region, and selectors were largely hoteliers or rural contractors. The 1884 Act, however, changed this. It resumed approximately half of the pastoral lessees’ land and invited land-seekers to apply for, without prior survey or advertisement, on the resumed half, up to 10,240 acres which they could hold under “homestead lease” for fifteen years (renewable). Gazettal of ministerial approval, along with the Act, served as title. The land was free except for (later) survey fees and payment of the existing lessee for “improvements”. The process thus resembled their predecessors’ in that they claimed land before survey and without government advertisement, but without even the cost of tendering.

Like Murray’s “squatters” of the 1870s, pastoral lessees, as they were now dubbed by the Act, were powerless to stop this legislation. However they formed a Sydney-based association to lobby about the Act for some ten years afterwards, and in the 1890s they sent Charles Dickens’s youngest son into parliament. He did not have his father’s persuasive powers. Their representative journal, the Pastoral Review, strongly urged a benign attitude towards the new homestead lessees, even when it was mooted that 10,240 acres was “too small” and should be increased, which it was. A kind of classless “country” interest was mooted—if you can’t stop them, get them on side against a common enemy.

The nationalistic Bulletin started to develop an image of the “squatter” as an absentee “English” landholder, an image which had only a little truth. Labor Party politicians embellished it over many years, culminating in Jack Lang’s rhetoric in the early 1930s, according to which squatters and finance companies had become one. Western Labor parliamentarians based in the populous mining towns of Cobar and Broken Hill excoriated the “squatters”, particularly Sidney Kidman. No matter that Kidman had entered the Division as late as 1910 and no matter that he had purchased all his landholdings on the market! “Largeness” was just one of his many sins.

Such was the hegemony of “democracy” and “closer settlement”, it was a Country Party minister’s legislation in 1934 that took even more land from larger leaseholders and drove Kidman out of western New South Wales. Much later, rural commentators there dared to suggest that the large landholding “companies” that had replaced some early landholders, often through mortgagee possession exercises from the 1890s on, had had “the right idea” in terms of their scale of operations, enabling them to move stock to fresh land before pasture and land degradation set in.

Jan Cooper
via e-mail

The Anachronistic QC

SIR: The item by Stuart Wood SC (May 2013) on reinstating the title QC was interesting in a number of ways. It showed first of all that this is an intended grab for business in the Asian arena by Australian lawyers bestowed with the title SC. Second, the article gives us a good potted history of the calling—of how ancient it is, going back to Sir Francis Bacon. That could be enough for us to reflect upon its current utility anyhow. And why should Australia—for the benefit of current SCs—go back to a colonial time of calling them QC?

But, third, the article at no place questioned the need for there still to be SCs (or QCs). The role is simply anachronistic and should be abolished. It should have stopped in Australia from the time of federation in 1901. There is nothing an SC can do that cannot be done just as well by any other senior lawyer. Yet people continue to engage them—less so these days, and that may help to explain the drive into Asia—adding hugely to the costs of litigation and ultimately impacting on the serious issue of access to justice. SCs (or QCs) should go the way of the old serjeants-at-law: they were simply phased out, the last one being Lord Lindley, although Serjeant Buzfuz still lives on in the writings of Dickens.

Damien Cremean
Melbourne, Vic

Sarah Paine

Sir: Paul Monk in his article “Portents of War Between China and Japan” (April 2013) refers extensively and approvingly to the work of Professor S.C. Paine from the US Naval War College. He refers to the author as “he” and talks about “his work” and “his new book”. Professor Paine is in fact Professor Sarah Paine, a talented female academic with extensive experience in China, Japan, Russia and Taiwan. She was in Australia for a year a few years ago while her husband, Professor Bruce Elleman, also from the US Naval War College, was here on sabbatical.

Sam Bateman
Mooloolaba, Qld

Researching in the Turkish Archives

Sir: John Williams’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Greeks from Gallipoli, April 1915” (April 2013) cites a quotation from me given in an interview about the Turkish documents made available to our Gallipoli Centenary Research project. Unfortunately the quotation does not relate my complete comment or context of the question and my response.

In explaining the process of acquiring documents in the interview I made the point that in the application for access to the Turkish military archives a researcher is required to state the exact subject matter of the research and the documents to be requested. In our case we stated the subject, appropriately for our research objectives, as the military and battle operations of the Gallipoli campaign. Our aim is to comprehensively relate the Turkish military response to the Allies’ campaign to take the Gallipoli Peninsula. The archive regulations mean that only documents, gleaned from the catalogues of documents, relating to the stated subject matter would be made available for research. We understand that this is the context in which documents are checked before release to the researcher. For the last three years all documents we have requested from the military archives have been delivered to us for perusal.

The Armenian tragedy continues to be an acknowledged “sensitive” and contentious matter in Turkey and elsewhere. However, because it was unfolding on the Ottoman eastern front, not in the west at Gallipoli, there is little likelihood that we would find such reference in the Gallipoli military documents coming to us. This was the context of my comment, which cannot and should not be used to argue that there is an official cover-up in the Turkish military archives. Of course a researcher could request documents from the archival catalogue that relate to the Ottoman eastern front, which might contain references to the Armenians of 1915, and see what ensues.

Harvey Broadbent
Director, Gallipoli Centenary Research Project
Macquarie University
Macquarie Park, NSW

Sir: It seems Harvey Broadbent’s access to the Turkish military archives has changed since the talk he gave in 2008. Here is the question from the floor and the first part of his answer, the latter quoted in my article in Quadrant (April 2013). 

Question: Some commentators have attempted to draw a connection between the so-called Armenian “genocide” and the Gallipoli campaign. The “genocide” clearly remains a sensitive issue for the Turks. Do the Turkish archives reveal a connection? 

Answer (Broadbent): I am sure that one of the reasons the Turkish archivists check their files so carefully before they release them to our research team is to ensure that there is no reference in the released papers to sensitive matters of the type to which you refer. [my emphasis]

I did not mention the other—obvious—reasons Broadbent gave why evidence concerning Turkish actions against the Armenians is unlikely to be found in the archives to which he has access (ATASE archives specifically relating to the Gallipoli campaign). This is because they scarcely bear upon my research into the fate of the Greek population of Gallipoli itself.

Any historian would select material on the basis of its relevance to the project in hand. To do so is not the same as distorting meaning. Even though my focus is on German involvement in the “deportations” of Gallipoli’s Greeks, the presence or absence of relevant documentation in Turkish archives has to be part of that story.

If, as Broadbent seemed to believe in 2008, these documents are selectively released, this at least accords with the 2012 view of Turkish historian Taner Ackam: 

My choice of the term “closed” in regard to the ATASE archives derives from the fact that there is very tight control and review of who is allowed to work there. A prime example of this inaccessibility is the lack of so much as a standard request form … those researchers who wish to work there must fill out the form used by the General Staff for hiring non-military personnel. Applicant scholars then find themselves forced to answer dozens of questions entirely unrelated to scholarly research … Furthermore, even after a researcher is granted permission to work in the archives—and few are—the tight supervision and control continues throughout his or her time in the archives.

John Williams
Hobart, Tas