Saturday 13 June 2020

Return to the Fatal Shore

I read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes a few years ago. In light of the current widespread unrest about slavery, I took it down again from the shelf today, to see whether it would be possible to argue that those transported to the penal colony that was the start of modern Australia could be described as slaves of a sort.

I quickly got distracted by all the many interesting things it has to say - for instance, the astonishing information that in London:

"around St Martin's, St James's and St Giles-in-the-Fields, there were large open pits filled with the rotting cadavers of paupers whose friends could get them no better burial; they were called 'Poor's Holes' and remained a London commonplace until the 1790s."

Passages like that ring alarm bells about trying to judge activities in the past by the standards of today. Human life generally was valued very differently from today.

And then I came across a passage filled with such prejudice that my outrage flared. Here it is:

They "are the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured with the light of Civilisation; men that have been familiar with ... every horrid Crime from their Infancy. Their minds, being destitute of every Principle of Religion and Morality, render them capable of perpetrating the most nefarious Acts in cool Blood. As they never appear to reflect upon Consequences, but to be ... always alive to Rebellion and Mischief, they are very dangerous members of Society. No Confidence whatever can be placed in them ... They are extremely superstitious, artful and treacherous, which renders it impossible for the most watchful and active Government to discover their real Intentions."

What a disgusting piece of racial hatred. We should all rise up in disgust when we realise that this was written by a representative of the Church of England, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, (1764-1838), who became the chief Anglican clergyman in New South Wales.

He was writing about the Irish, by the way.




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