WI: Convict/Aborigoni peace lasts longer?

First let me say that I know very little of Australian history. Second, I saw a documentary today. It said that early on, the Aboriginal population got along relatively well (compared to say, America, or South Africa). That the Aboriginal tribes respected the guy (forget his name) that the British put in charge because he was missing the same tooth as was ritually removed when one of them became a shaman, and that for a while, the Aboriginals even lived side by side with the Convicts in Sidney, sometimes even sharing the same houses and eating together. It also said that all this ended when some psychopath decided it would be good sport to go around shooting the natives for no reason.
 
sort of... their was no real period of peace - just a waiting period before the whites were populous enough to need to kick the blacks off their land.

the kooris were not interested in what the whites hand other than out of curiosity... really, in the first years the whites were just starving wretched things who seemed to spend their time brutally abusing each other.

also the missin tooth story is racist - another sillly gullible black people story
 
The first Governor of NSW was Captain Arthur Philip of the Royal Navy. There are records of high degree of cooperation between Aboriginal Australians and the First Fleet. In fact, a number of the indigenous peoples moved into the Sydney settlement and it was only after Philip's departure (and the effective takover of the colony by the NSW Corps and the increasing dominance of rum as currency) that things began to collapse completely.

The story about the tooth is factually correct. Philip was regarded as a shaman (once it was established that the whites were human) and his work with Bennelong (the Aboriginal envoy) indicated that cooperation may have been possible. Bennelong was initially chained (Philip wanted to educate him and use him as an interpreter), but later lived happily in the Governor's house without any restrictions.

As an example of Philip's attitude, his first law was that the local people could not be seized for slave labour. Later, Philip, IIRC, was speared at one stage by the locals because he had broken a taboo, but accepted his injury in good grace in recognition that he had probably crossed some unknown line. The breakdown in relations came when Philip's gameskeeper was killed in retaliation for his "hunting" of Aboriginals; Philip appears to have been unaware of his servant's favourite sideline and believed his death unjustified, demanding harsh retaliation for the "crime".

Admittedly, there was some aggressive behaviour on both sides, but even after all these events, many opportunities existed for peaceful cooperation. The Wiradjuri peoples of the central plains sent Windradyne to offer peace to Governor Brisbane and assisted some of the settlers who established what is now Bathurst. That was twenty years after the first "invaders" arrived.

In Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), things were a lot more brutal. Governor Arthur had none of the sensibilities of Governor Philip and regarded the Aboriginal people as feral pests who drove down real estate prcies. However, Hobart was more or less founded as the prison of last resort and so was the dumping ground for the most hardened of the criminals which Sydney Town was unable to moderate. It had a reputation for being hellish for its white inhabitants as well as the local indigenous peoples.

BTW, I am a member of the Yuin people, was initiated by the Warlpiri people and teach Aboriginal Studies at a high school located in Wiradjuri territory. So I'm not spinning "gullible black people" stories.
 
As has been said when the Settlers become strong and secure enough and when the supply of "free" good quality land begins to run out the same thing is going to happen as in OTL. Simply put 18th Century people of whatever Culture aren't all that interested in the "Historical Rights of Others", and to be honest I'm not sure that 21st Century people are all that different.
 

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Australian history in this respect is particularly brutal.

Disease and then 18th century racism pretty much ran its course, i can't really see how this could be changed. You basically need to keep white settlement to a minimum until either the local population can recover or the attitude of the British changes.

I've always liked Moslem Australia by Matt White

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/misc/auslam1.htm

Still not the best relations between colonials and natives but at least the Indigenous Australian population isn't wiped out.
 
I saw a documentary today.
Was it "First Australians", episode 1? I've seen that. I have the whole thing on DVD, but I haven't gotten around to watching the rest of the episodes.

That documentary made me realise how little I really know about my own country's history. I mean, in school you learn some of the important dates and you learn a bit about the societal structure and such, but what you don't learn about is the people, and the real feeling of the time. I mean, I knew that Arthur Phillip was the first Governor of New South Wales but I had no idea if he was good, bad or indifferent, pragmatic, idealistic, brutal, gentle, loved or hated. I just knew he existed.

I mean, here's the equivalent of what I knew about 18th-century Australia as applied to the 1960s: "There was a war in Vietnam, which Australia fought in alongside the Americans. Kennedy was president of the USA but he was killed, then Johnson was president, then Nixon. There was the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in the outlawing of legal discrimination." And that's it. A lot of facts are there, but the real truth isn't. There's nothing there about what it'd actually like to live through it, to really feel it.

History is a story -- or rather, many stories. The reason why people enjoy historical films or books or whatever is because they do more than just show you the stats of what happened when and where and how much: they tell a story -- a (preferably) true story -- about how it was for the people of the time, how they lived or didn't live through that particular time period, what their lives were like. And even with narratives on an epic or even global scale, it still comes down to people and human feelings -- the wills of the leaders, the feeling of the masses, why some course of action was taken or not. Most chapters of Look To The West are impersonal accounts of alt-historical events in one country or several that can span several years -- and yet each time we are given detail, motivation, execution and ramifications. Think how dull LTTW would be if it were nothing but a list, summarising important dates and events in bullet-point form.

Maybe if we were taught history as a story and not as a list, we would learn more from it.
 
Australian history in this respect is particularly brutal.

Disease and then 18th century racism pretty much ran its course, i can't really see how this could be changed. You basically need to keep white settlement to a minimum until either the local population can recover or the attitude of the British changes.

I've always liked Moslem Australia by Matt White

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/misc/auslam1.htm

Still not the best relations between colonials and natives but at least the Indigenous Australian population isn't wiped out.

Um, we weren't wiped out in this timeline either.
 
Was it "First Australians", episode 1? I've seen that. I have the whole thing on DVD, but I haven't gotten around to watching the rest of the episodes.

That documentary made me realise how little I really know about my own country's history. I mean, in school you learn some of the important dates and you learn a bit about the societal structure and such, but what you don't learn about is the people, and the real feeling of the time. I mean, I knew that Arthur Phillip was the first Governor of New South Wales but I had no idea if he was good, bad or indifferent, pragmatic, idealistic, brutal, gentle, loved or hated. I just knew he existed.

I mean, here's the equivalent of what I knew about 18th-century Australia as applied to the 1960s: "There was a war in Vietnam, which Australia fought in alongside the Americans. Kennedy was president of the USA but he was killed, then Johnson was president, then Nixon. There was the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in the outlawing of legal discrimination." And that's it. A lot of facts are there, but the real truth isn't. There's nothing there about what it'd actually like to live through it, to really feel it.

History is a story -- or rather, many stories. The reason why people enjoy historical films or books or whatever is because they do more than just show you the stats of what happened when and where and how much: they tell a story -- a (preferably) true story -- about how it was for the people of the time, how they lived or didn't live through that particular time period, what their lives were like. And even with narratives on an epic or even global scale, it still comes down to people and human feelings -- the wills of the leaders, the feeling of the masses, why some course of action was taken or not. Most chapters of Look To The West are impersonal accounts of alt-historical events in one country or several that can span several years -- and yet each time we are given detail, motivation, execution and ramifications. Think how dull LTTW would be if it were nothing but a list, summarising important dates and events in bullet-point form.

Maybe if we were taught history as a story and not as a list, we would learn more from it.

Watch it, very informative, even if you have to put up with the bitter rants of Marcia Langton from time to time.
 
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