Abstract
Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of self-published family histories of “settlement” held at the National Library of Australia. With close attention to family historians’ books, I consider how genealogical research can revise the collective memories that shape both familial and national imaginaries and offer a model for truth-telling.
Keywords
The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots”
Efforts to break what W.E.H. Stanner called “the great Australian silence” around colonial history have provoked national debates for decades. 2 Historians have made major inroads bringing frontier violence, dispossession, and Indigenous-settler relations into public memory by examining candid colonial accounts and exploring why more recent histories exclude this knowledge. 3 Yet the question of what Australians remember and forget as a nation remains fraught. While Australia’s violent colonial history is well-documented, there is still a struggle to have this history recognized in official public memory, where tales of stoic nation-building and shared prosperity hold fast. The push to remember is evident in recent bids to remove or rebrand monuments that fete colonial leaders, and to change the date of Australia Day so national identity is not predicated upon colonial conquest/invasion. In this spirit, the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart also calls for public truth-telling about colonial history. Collectively authored by representatives from Indigenous communities across the country and addressed to Australia’s political leaders, the statement recommends a Makarrata Commission—a proper forum where Indigenous voices and histories can be told and where non-Indigenous people must listen. Dialogues leading up to the Uluru Statement insist that to listen, non-Indigenous Australians—especially those with early settler histories—must be willing to rethink inherited narratives that can sustain colonial logics and stall historical reckoning. 4
So far, efforts to unsettle the settler narrative of Australia’s history focus on revising stories at the macro level, with debates about what should be included in national museums and school curriculums. 5 Surprisingly, the role of the family as a place where colonial histories are told, edited, ignored, and hotly debated, has received far less attention. While family accounts of colonial times have been used as historical sources (mostly in local and regional histories), studies that focus on Australian family storytelling as a unique and complex site of historiography in its own right are limited. But the stories we inherit within families—stories that anchor our sense of identity and belonging—may be the most deep-seated, and the most difficult to transform. 6 They are what Arlie Hochschild calls “deep stories,” inherited narratives that can operate as “empathy walls” siloing our world-view and blocking insight into others’ experiences. 7 Bringing family to the center of conversations about truth-telling, I explore how Australian families use inherited stories and memories to rationalize and reproduce—but importantly also interrogate and challenge—silences about colonial history.
To map the diverse ways that settler families narrate their histories, I will draw from a study of self-published family histories I conducted at the National Library of Australia (NLA) in 2019. My analysis adopts Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” which highlights the social impact of retelling colonial myths and applies it to family storytelling. 8 After outlining this framework and my methodology, the paper analyzes a sample of family histories of “settlement” and examines how their authors seek to keep or break inherited silences around dispossession. While these are often very personal stories, written by and for the family, the texts also hold powerful information about how history circulates within families, as people work through stories, secrets, silences, and myths—or the “colonial storytelling” we inherit at home. To conclude, I locate the family as a potential site for truth-telling about the colonial past.
Colonial Storytelling
In Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (2016), Behrendt traces retellings of Eliza Fraser’s story in Australian popular culture. In the tale, the Stirling Castle is shipwrecked off the east coast of Australia in 1836. Eliza, Scottish wife of the ship’s captain, survives and purportedly lives with the Butchulla people on K’gari (Fraser Island), until rescued by a search party. Behrendt unpacks how this story, told and retold across popular novels and films, conducts myths about vulnerable white women needing to be saved by brave colonial men from blood-thirsty cannibals. Behrendt is interested in what stories like Eliza’s do, and what they “sanction.” 9
Behrendt finds that tales of Eliza Fraser conform to a larger colonial “captivity narrative” that was popular in North America and the Pacific. 10 These pulp “true stories” portrayed white women being taken and held captive by “savages” with profound sexual appetites. These “eyewitness” narratives circulated across colonial contexts and were used to create dehumanizing caricatures of Indigenous peoples as captors and cannibals, to escalate white fear and prejudice, and to validate colonial policies. Behrendt argues that, “[t]hese stories became an important part of the colonising process because they illustrated the reasons given to justify the taking of Aboriginal land. They became part of the popular narrative of Australian history—the white man battling the elements and taming the wild land and the wild people upon it—for many years.” 11
Tales of Eliza transmit these stereotypes across centuries. They are present in early nineteenth century accounts including Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and Miraculous Escape of Mrs Eliza Fraser (1837). 12 And carry over into twentieth century works such as White Blackfellows: The Strange Adventures of Europeans Who Lived Among Savages (1948), and Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore (1971). 13 Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves (1973) and Sidney Nolan’s 1947 painting “Mrs Fraser,” although they exorcise other themes, continue to draw on the mythology of Eliza as the civilized woman transformed by an uncivilized land. 14 Behrendt shows that such stories have a powerful social impact; they “do not occur in a vacuum; they meander into our value systems and our institutions.” 15 Through repetition these stories continue to validate colonial logics.
Shifting focus from the civic sphere, my analysis explores how Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might operate within the intimate space of families. It examines how the stories families retell about colonial history shape their descendants’ historical consciousness. These stories differ from the popular tales that Behrendt describes. They are often told quite privately, within one family. Family stories are also less salacious and chart humble events, the establishment of a farm; the joining of two families in marriage, and so on. However, family histories can still work as “colonial storytelling.” They transmit memories between generations in a way that can uphold colonial mythologies and obscure the realities of “settlement.” In their retelling, family stories also offer a chance to revise inherited tales and incorporate newly discovered knowledge about the past.
Family Memory as a Site of Reckoning
The field of Memory Studies offers rich analyses of national silences and acts of remembering and forgetting at the macro scale, in history curriculums, national museums, cultural texts, and memorial sites. 16 There are also studies that look at how colonial histories are remembered in regional and local settings. 17 In contrast, there have been far fewer studies about the role of family memory and history-making practices in upholding or breaking silences, my focus here. Work on local history indicates that intimate spaces are where memories about Indigenous-settler relations are transmitted despite silences at the national level. For example, at the local scale, Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck recast “the great Australian silence” as “the great Australian whispering.” 18 They argue that while: “state-sanctioned commemorations of foundation have largely channelled a story of origins that gave little voice to the history of Aboriginal subjugation and dispossession, at a more local level this pattern of silence has never held in the same way.” 19 Following Foster and Nettelbeck, we can extend this attention to the family, as a site where memories are transmitted in ways that may not chime with national accounts.
The reception of novels such as Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Sally Morgan’s My Place, and Kim Scott’s Taboo, or television miniseries such as Mystery Road, prove that unpacking family secrets can help us confront national silences and stimulate public discussion around Australia’s colonial histories. 20 And with the recent boom in family history research, inspired by television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and easy access to records on Ancestry.com, more and more Australians are discovering that long-held family myths and mysteries can cover hidden truths about our colonial history. 21 Family historians have long been typecast as sentimental amateurs by professional historians, but in recent decades academics have taken family histories more seriously as sources for colonial history. 22 Witness accounts, for example, described in memoirs of life on the frontier, are knitted together with other sources to produce local or regional histories that may dispute the smoothness of national histories and add further nuance to historiographic debates. 23 However, there is less research on family documents as a mode of historiography and colonial memory-making in and of themselves.
As a sociology of the family, my study brings family histories to the center and contributes to existing work on settler colonial remembering at the intersection of local and national scales. It builds on existing research, such as Skye Krichauff’s recent ethnography of settler belonging in mid-north South Australia, which finds that, despite all of the facts about Aboriginal history now available, people’s ideas about the past often still draw from the stories they inherit at home. 24 In this paper I draw attention to how families reckon with colonial history via writing about their ancestors. This understanding is important because, as a powerful unit of social reproduction, the stories learnt and retold within families may influence whether people are receptive or defensive to histories of Indigenous-settler relations on Australia’s frontier and therefore effect future truth-telling processes.
Non-professional family history research is an everyday practice where people can engage with political issues via learning about their family’s place in social history. 25 In a settler colonial context, public historian Tanya Evans argues that family histories have a “radical potential” to revise dominant stories. 26 As people discover secrets within their families, they begin to question the smooth truth of received histories. Geographer Paul Basu also found that heritage tourists from settler countries began to empathize with the suffering of Indigenous communities after discovering their own families’ experiences of dispossession in the Scottish Highland Clearances. 27 Studies of settler memory in contexts such as New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa suggest that family stories play a significant role in silencing colonization and excusing settler descendants of responsibility. 28 However, the few sociological studies of ancestry in Australia focus exclusively on convict heritage. 29
In the field of life writing and auto/biography, Indigenous writers lead the way in opening up the family as a space where histories are being contested, recovered, transmitted, and preserved. In these texts family history is the central lens and site of historiographic work, rather than a source for a wider history. Scholarly family histories such as James Miller’s Koori: A Will to Win and John Heath’s Birrpai, for example, consider the history of colonization, displacement, assimilation, resistance, and resilience through the prism of family. 30 Collaborative life writing texts, including Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me, and Jackie and Rita Huggins’ Auntie Rita, track the flow and obstruction of knowledge between generations, and between family memory and state archives. 31 Very little similarly frank, intergenerational work has been published by settler families in the Australian setting. The literary family histories of Kate Grenville and Judith Wright’s A Cry for the Dead pose well-known exceptions to this. 32 Though both are sole-authored and have been critiqued for sentimentalism, these texts revisit and revise family histories of Indigenous-settler relations that have been silenced via creative engagements with their ancestors’ role as perpetrators. 33 Myriad lesser-known family histories, some of which I will discuss here, also document and/or consider Indigenous-settler relations in their family’s past.
By examining settler families’ written histories, we can better understand how descendants avoid or address their family’s role in constructing and sustaining the commemoration of settlers as pioneers of the nation.
Method
I model my methodology on sociologist Liz Stanley’s longitudinal project Whites Writing Whiteness, which tracks the formation of Apartheid in South Africa via archives of letters written by white settlers. 34 Stanley argues that “documents of life” can reveal how social structures and divisions are created day-to-day. The letters show how common people (not just political leaders or members of the social elite) articulate the logic of white supremacy and how they racialize themselves and others, often through silence and omission. By commenting on everyday life, the letters display “the world white people saw themselves as living in […] how they saw the social order being organised, regarding what kinds of people did what kinds of things, and concerning how groups of people were associated with supposedly ‘innate’ aspects of whiteness and blackness.” 35 These private documents reveal the development of racializing processes that relied upon widespread social complicity. Drawing from Stanley, my study of self-published family histories, as “documents of family life,” tracks how these texts transmit colonial thinking within Australian settler families.
I also use Stanley’s methodology for reading large-scale collections of documents. Stanley calls these collections “black boxes,” drawing from a computing term that describes a system that hides its inner workings. 36 She instructs scholars on how to approach an archive that is too comprehensive to be examined closely in its entirety. This methodology seeks to “read” the archive across three scales: mapping, sampling, and analyzing. 37 Mapping looks at the collection as a whole to get a topographical view, using catalogs, finding aids, indexes, metadata, and so on. Sampling involves “surface reading” lots of texts quickly to note their overall form, aims, and place in the collection. Analyzing requires “close reading” fewer texts slowly to study their details, meaning, and social implications.
For the mapping level of my project, I referred to an index of self-published family histories held at the NLA produced by Ralph Reid, author of Australian Family Histories: A Bibliography and Index. 38 This list of more than 8,000 texts includes the title, author, year, and place of publication for all of the family histories from 1882 to 2016. The titles have been my main source for locating themes and patterns. This only allows me to identify texts with descriptive titles, and effectively excludes books with titles like “the history of the X family” that do not offer thematic indicators of their content. Given a significant number have such titles, much of the collection remains in what Stanley calls the “black box.” It is also important to note that family histories may be deposited in state and local libraries rather than the NLA, and that figures may reflect informal trends in the Library’s collecting priorities at different times. My focus on published family histories offers a selective view of family storytelling and does not include oral stories within family. I have written on family historians’ ethical deliberations about what to include in published histories elsewhere. Here I analyze the published material directly and focus on stories that are told within families. 39
In sampling the texts one of my aims has been to think about family histories as “colonial storytelling.” For the scope of this paper I focus on a sample that included all of the family histories with “settle/d”; “settler/s”; or “settlement” in the title, totaling 85 texts. 40 As noted, there may be other family histories in the collection dealing with settlement that due to my title-based sampling method were not identified. However, even this modest sample offers rich insights into the diverse ways that Australian families narrate Indigenous-settler relations within their ancestry.
The term “settled” is a known site of political contestation. For example, in 2016, there was public backlash when the University of New South Wales produced a pamphlet encouraging school teachers to use the words “colonization” and “invasion” in addition to “settlement” and “discovery” in classes on Australia’s colonial history.
41
This event is only one episode in an ever-present public debate where some citizens resist and others promote discussing the violence at Australia’s foundations. In her 2017 essay “Settlement or Invasion?: The Coloniser’s Quandary,” Behrendt describes the fatigue and importance of this debate: [T]here is the challenge of how the dominant national narrative—the story the nation tells itself—deals with the invasion moment. This question has become bogged down in the emotions of the “invasion” or “settled” debate. The stand-off gets in the way of a more sophisticated, nuanced, and inclusive narrative. Unless and until we get that part of the story straight—finally—the other parts matter less.
42
As Behrendt insists this word “settlement” obscures the violence it truly depicts. My analysis asks how authors who directly label their family story as a story of “settlement” narrate this history. What does this term do in family histories? Does it do the same thing that this word does in national history? Does it, as Behrendt describes, create a deadlock; or seek to minimize, rationalize, or silence dispossession and violence, or does this term do something different in histories at the family level? These questions informed my close analysis.
As a descriptive note on the sample, there were no texts with the word “invasion” in the title. However, I found that older texts used this word in the body of the work, also referring to colonists as “invaders” or “white invaders,” even when the text was otherwise quite racist. Mark McKenna affirms this (seemingly anachronistic) trend, noting that in “the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “warfare” and “invasion” were terms frequently used to describe frontier conflict in Australia.” 43 Interestingly, the conservative aversion to this word seems to appear later. No Indigenous family histories came up in this sample either, but as part of my broader study I read all the Indigenous family histories held in the NLA that I could identify from the index or the catalog. One difference I noticed between Indigenous family histories and the texts in this sample, is that Indigenous authors could not just ignore or omit Indigenous-settler relations in the story of their families and communities because the settler state intervened into their lives constantly, at the most intimate levels, across each generation. Given this, it is important to acknowledge that silence can be an expression of white privilege. As Stanley writes, the “privilege of whiteness” can be “in not seeing that it is white and privileged, which brackets off and invisibilises the agency of white people in going along (to put it no stronger) with the hierarchies and attendant practices of the racial order.” 44 Settler family histories that indicate no sense of the settler colonial context are still absolutely expressions of those socio-political structures.
Family Histories of Settlement
In the 85 family histories written by settler descendants that I read for this sample, practices of silencing and rationalizing were pervasive and will be my focus here. But the approach to narrating Indigenous-settler relations was diverse. Around one third of the sample did not mention Indigenous-settler relations at all. While it is easier to analyze texts where the traces of silence can be followed, we cannot overlook the absolute omission in one third of the texts as another form of colonial storytelling, albeit in the negative —the story of total erasure, or terra nullius, that was the basis of colonization in Australia. Of the two thirds that did mention Indigenous-settler relations, sometimes this was very brief, such as noting that a place name was an Aboriginal word meaning X.
Only a few of the stories in the sample fit directly into the model of grand myth-making that Behrendt discusses in Finding Eliza. In a similar vein to the captivity narrative Behrendt analyses, two texts described white children being stolen by Aboriginal people. To detail one example, Claudia M. Dean recounts a story relayed by her uncle in her 1995 family history Francis and Mary Spence: First Burnie Area Settlers and Launceston Pioneers.
45
As the story unfolds, it takes the genre of “a family tale,” including credulity-testing details: Another look at their [the author’s grandparents] life in these early days of settlement of VDL was given by their son, Francis, when he told the writer of an article “that when he and his brother and sisters were young children the black folk used to come to the family’s dwelling place and seek to exchange their ‘black piccaninnies’ for the ‘white piccaninnies’ and how a refusal on the family’s part was often fraught with danger.” What a terrifying situation. It is no wonder that the young son, Francis, remembered it so vividly that he related it later in life. “On numbers of occasions the blacks sought to obtain possession of the children by force, and on one occasion, while withstanding a siege […], one native warrior succeeded in sending a spear through a chink in the wall. The weapon passed through one of his father’s legs and entered the other leg, pinning the two legs together.” Wouldn’t Mary and the children, as well as the father, Francis, be absolutely scared. “He never fully recovered from the effects of that poisoned spear and he was compelled to use crutches all the latter years of his life.”
46
The quote is difficult to follow because it slips between direct quotation of a primary source and the author’s commentary. However, we might think about what retelling this story does, or what it “sanctions,” as it recirculates within the family in 1995, two years before the Bringing Them Home Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families is released. 47 This report detailed the formal and informal government policies that sanctioned the taking of Aboriginal children from their families to be placed in missions, boarding schools, or white families. These children came to be known as the Stolen Generations. Putting this inherited tale in context, in White Vanishing, Elspeth Tilley explains that stories about the “lost white child” are an “obstinate cultural trope” repeated in folktales and popular culture, and here, as we see, within the family, to construct an image of settler vulnerability in a savage land. 48
As noted, within the sample, there were few stories that fit Behrendt’s model of “colonial storytelling.” In a lot of the self-published family histories, there is either no or little mention of Indigenous-settler relations, let alone “storytelling.” But even in finer details, and less bold stories, we can see how family tales distract from the real colonial violence and wrongdoing wrought by settlers. My analysis seeks to give gravity to narratives that subtly reproduce colonial myths. This required reading for small details, like if and how authors account for the fact that places have Aboriginal names, even when they claim that no Aboriginal people lived there. It has also required reading for silences or elisions. In this process, I saw certain “genres of silence” emerge across the texts.
For the rest of the paper, I unpack the diverse ways that family historians deal with silences about dispossession, or Aboriginal occupancy of the land their ancestors “settled.” The first section keeping silence details two of the common narratives where authors reproduced or rationalized elisions: stories of “uninhabited” places and stories of “uncultivated” places. The second section breaking silence analyzes two cases where authors challenge inherited family memory. I chose these examples because they are illustrative of the wider trends within the sample, which, due to scope, cannot be analyzed in full.
Keeping Silences
Stories of “Uninhabited” Places
Several family histories opened with florid natural histories of the place ancestors settled, full of plants but seemingly uninhabited by humans. We might call these “family tales of terra nullius.” One example of this narrative appears in Bernard Jean Alphonse Bellanger’s 1980 Champagne and Tingle Trees: A Memoir of the Bellanger Family Who First Settled the Nornalup District, Western Australia. The book describes the life of a French family who arrive in Fremantle in 1899, and set up a camp at Nornalup, a coastal area south of the state’s capital, Perth, in 1908. In the opening chapter, Bellanger writes, “Ted, Marie and myself were the first white children to be born in the district.” 49 Despite this caveat, he does not mention Aboriginal children or peoples. Bellanger describes the land as “wild,” “uninhabited,” “sparse,” “uncharted,” “unsurveyed,” “unknown,” and “impenetrable.” When talking about Nornalup he describes the trees as custodians, in language that transposes Aboriginal ownership: “Out of the silence the gigantic trees seemed to whisper: ‘Do not profane the isles of our hallowed place. We are the gods of the soil, the custodians of a sacred heritage. Our roots have been down in this earth for centuries’.” 50 Arguably, this language, even in its exclusion of people, betrays familiarity with the terms of Aboriginal connection to Country—of custodianship, sacred ground, and deep time. It suggests both omission and appropriation.
Bernard’s brother, uncle, and mother have also written family histories, which are held in other Library collections. When read together they offer intra- and inter-generational perspectives on the Bellanger family’s settlement in Nornalup. Older family histories produced by the Bellangers mention Noongar people living at Nornalup. As with the language around “invaders,” this demonstrates how forgetting and remembering can be quite non-linear in families, with things that are discussed in earlier generations being silenced later on.
However, it is also important to look at what purpose the disclosure of Indigenous-settler relations serves. For example, in the writings of Andre Bellanger (Bernard’s uncle) Noongar inhabitance of the area is discussed, but in a way that bolsters the image of the rugged pioneer, who will penetrate and tame places that (according to him) even the Aboriginal peoples did not go. Andre writes: Sometimes in the dead of night, a stray dingo raises its heart-chilling howl. Only a few semi-civilised [A]boriginals remain in the district, but even in the “early days” they never lived in the forest. Its dense vegetation rendered it uninhabitable to the sun-loving blacks. Only in the summer months did they wend their way down to the sea to spear fish in the inlets […].
51
Foster and Nettelbeck explain that open discussions of Aboriginal presence, such as this one, are often “framed by the emergent pioneer legend.” In the context of South Australia, they note, “the first generation of settlers were penning their experiences for the benefit of future generations in carrying on the legacy they had left. This was a time for consolidating the historical landscape through which settlers and their descendants sought, through remembrance, to secure their stories of rightful possession.” 52 “What these foundational accounts demonstrate” they conclude, “is a partial kind of remembrance, one that recalls and at the same time forgets.” 53 Inga Clendinnen argues that this was similarly common in depictions of frontier violence, where “the fight Aborigines had put up was simply forgotten except as a context for legends about white settler heroism.” 54 In this “partial remembrance,” the Bellanger uncle, Andre, is less silent than his nephew Bernard, but his account still veils a proper discussion of Indigenous-settler relations, and instead claims that the specific piece of land the family “settled” was not inhibited by Noongar people and, at the same time, constructs the superior stoicism of the European pioneer.
The perpetuation of this narrative echoes through the next generation as George Bellanger (Bernard’s brother) alludes to colonial literature in his description of life at Nornalup: “There began for the two pioneer families a life similar to the Swiss Family Robinson, full of risks, hardships and hazards, and at the same time, of wondrous and beautiful adventure.” 55 In this example we can see how “colonial storytelling,” as it crosses colonial contexts, may feed into the way settler descendants conceive of, narrate, and justify their ancestors’ occupation of Aboriginal land. The intergenerational scope of the Bellangers’ written family histories captures the transmission of knowledge about Indigenous-settler relations within families, and shows how certain memories becomes silenced, perhaps as the social consequences of being a descendant of dispossessors change. But we also see the attractive role of family myth and story, as it imbues the family with an identity that seems adventurous. The identity of the family is therefore entangled in the retelling of history, and may be at risk if this shared history is reframed in terms of colonial wrongdoing or culpability. At stake in family truth-telling then, may be more than just a willingness to see the facts but also a willingness to challenge the mythology and culture of the family.
Stories of “Abandoned” or “Uncultivated Places”
Questions of culpability were sometimes silent drivers in family histories as authors carefully framed their ancestors’ movements and attitudes at settlement. Several family historians wrote that Aboriginal people had “left” or “abandoned” a place, often right before their ancestors arrived. Sometimes this story of “moving” echoed colonial claims that Aboriginal people did not cultivate the land and therefore did not possess it. This has been thoroughly rebutted, most recently and publicly in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. 56 An example where this narrative underpins the family story, and shapes the author’s sense of historical responsibility, can be seen in Nancy Edgar’s 1978 Burnt Eucalyptus Bark: Early Settlers of the Far Western District of Victoria.
The book does not deal extensively with Indigenous-settler relations, and mostly focuses on family events and farming. However, dispossession haunts the author’s narrative. For example, the title page includes this quotation: “When European man came to this country it was in a state of ecological balance, certain grasses grew, certain animals grazed, and certain people lived; they were nomads.”
57
In later sections, the trope of the nomad resurfaces, as the author tells of how early family letters referred to Aboriginal people, “to the death of others at their hands, to the sad massacres, and to the fact that they were a wandering people.”
58
In a final section, Edgar considers her ancestors’ responsibility: Thinking back, it is quite clear that the early settlers, or “colonists” as they were called, could have no conscious feelings of guilt whilst they were settling this land, which as far as they were concerned and by their standards was not being used. How could they have had any feelings of guilt, for they were sent out here, at first as convicts and those in charge of convicts; then many were sent out or induced to go as pauperised migrants to be made better of financially and at the same time help get the wool off the sheep’s back. As well, others were sent out to try and cure chest complaints with our warm sunny climate.
59
In this quotation we see how family historians can rationalize ancestors’ actions, in ways that tap into wider colonial narratives used to justify dispossession. The overarching claim is that settlers were “sent”; they did not choose to come to the colony and therefore are not responsible for dispossession. This reasoning also shows how the “hopes” of the settler “making good” can be invoked in family stories, as it is in national stories, to dispel the violent reality of colonial expansion. Nonetheless, in this last quotation we hear a descendant who, even allowing for past ignorance (though we may question this), is aware of their ancestors’ culpability. In this context, the inherited rationale is repeated, but becomes less tenable and therefore requires explicit justification. Here again, as with the Bellanger family histories, we see how families, via “colonial storytelling,” can perpetuate colonial myths and justifications within histories that are written well after the colonial period—with all texts included in my sample published post-1970. Close attention to these family histories demonstrates how family lore—with its investment in the reputation of ancestors and the living family—can defend and revive much earlier colonial logics, even in the context of public challenges to this way of narrating the past.
Breaking Silences
Acknowledgments of Country
Along with genres of reproducing silences, there were examples of authors trying to challenge silences within their family stories. For example, getting into the 2000s, I started to notice “acknowledgment of country” sections in the opening pages of family histories. In these, authors acknowledge that the land their families settled was already occupied, and that their ancestors likely interacted with Aboriginal peoples, even if this is omitted in family memory. An example of this can be found in Ross Wade’s 2011 Introducing the Wade Family of Gulgong. After the foreword is a page entitled “First Peoples.” Wade writes: Before the colonisation/invasions of 1788, Australia was in the care and management of the several Aboriginal tribal groups who occupied the whole land in smaller family bands. Whilst not a civilisation in the European sense it was nevertheless a network of peoples who maintained an extraordinary spirit of survival on the land as well as an elaborate and well defined tradition of storytelling, poetry, dance, drama, alongside other artistic skills such as far reaching trading practices and cross language intertribal communications. These first peoples are acknowledged in these records for the following reasons: Firstly, they are respected for their ownership and care of the country over millennia. Secondly, it is recognised that several of the Wade extended family group have over time married through to members of the original Aboriginal groupings. This is not an uncommon situation for Australians hailing from social circumstances in the middle of the 19th Century.
60
Here, Wade acknowledges the broader issue of dispossession, and notes marriages between settlers and Aboriginal people within the Wade family. He further notes that this is true of many families, seeking to challenge the dominant narrative of silence and segregation in settler family histories beyond his own kin. However, the details of these marriages, and intercultural relations broadly, are not discussed within the text.
A similar section appears in the foreword to Jane Van Woerkom’s An Aussie Family Yarn Skeletons and All!. The 2014 edition contains a passage that acknowledges the “Aboriginal people.” In the 2016 edition this is updated to note the names of specific nations. This demonstrates a shift in the author’s knowledge about Aboriginal history and culture across the two years. However, Van Woerkom also notes that, aside from this opening acknowledgment, the family history (as with Wade’s) does not detail Indigenous-settler relations: Importantly, it should not be left unsaid, that these early settlers lived alongside the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land, known to European settlers as “Terra Australis and New Holland.” In Aboriginal terms there was no word or concept that covered the whole land and only clan names for territories and “countries” inhabited by the Eora, Cadigal, Awabakal and Kamilaroi were able to be recorded. […] While no direct connections to the traditional owners are recorded in this family yarn, the places our ancestors lived, suggests that relationships and contacts must have been made. To these first “Australians” we show our respect to elders past and present and acknowledge the land we now share.
61
These family histories acknowledge silences and missing details. But they stop short of seeking to break silences or fill in gaps within the larger narrative of the family history. This disconnect links back to Krichauff’s discovery that even when frontier violence was acknowledged by the South Australian land-owners she studied this did not mean they considered that their ancestors may have been involved or saw how they, as descendants, might otherwise benefit economically from the outcomes of dispossession. 62 Even though the writers I cite here are family historians and are expressly engaged in connecting local and family histories, their desire to acknowledge Aboriginal ownership similarly does not extend to exploring Indigenous-settler relations within the stories that make up the bulk of the books. These examples show how silences can be owned but not broken and how remembering can screen forgetting within families. By including acknowledgments of country, the texts demonstrate a growing historical consciousness, but still do not bring this lens to ancestors’ day-to-day lives.
Filling in Family Silences
In contrast, within the sample there were five cases where authors did attempt to revise the family history via research into local history and Aboriginal history. Brian Walsh’s 1999 Tocal’s First European Settler was the most elaborate of these texts. Walsh begins by writing about James Phillip Webber’s arrival in Sydney from London in 1822, then traces his move to Tocal, in the lower Hunter Valley of New South Wales, to “take up” a land grant later that year. This chapter ends with the ominous line, “When James arrived in Tocal in March 1822 with four servants and six tons of baggage, he did not move onto unoccupied land.” 63 In the following chapter, “After the Dreaming,” Walsh seeks to fill in family silences by revising his opening account.
Walsh does not accept the idea that because the family did not talk about Indigenous-settler relations that they did not take place, or that they cannot now be known and included. He consults historical sources to see what occurred in the region at that time, including Wonnarua scholar James Miller’s 1985 family history Koori: A Will to Win. 64 Walsh writes: “When James Webber moved to Tocal in March 1822 it was most likely occupied by the Gringai clan of Wonnarua people. James Webber’s relationship with the local Kooris is not known. Between 1820 and 1825, there is no recorded conflict between the Gringai and settlers in the Lower Hunter area.” (As Miller notes, several key settler histories of the Lower Hunter were written by men who had never actually visited the area). 65 Pressing further, Walsh finds insights in local histories and primary documents, “However, in July 1822 Major Morisset reported that the military posts at Wallis and Paterson plains each had three soldiers and a constable to protect the settlers against ‘the black natives, who were very savage at that particular time’.” 66
Recognizing the value of consulting family accounts, Walsh also gathers evidence from family histories written by descendants of other settler families in the Lower Hunter area. He finds a family history that records inherited stories about Indigenous-settler conflict at that time, “Edward Corey a settler at Paterson not far from James Webber came into conflict with the Gringai. A descendent of Corey writes: ‘The Corey’s suffered their own losses […] their barns and haystacks were burned, their sheep attacked, their workmen speared’.” 67 Outlining a complex set of relations that involved conflict and co-operation, Walsh finds primary sources that document the Gringai sharing knowledge about seasons and local land-care practices with settlers in the area. Going into some depth to understand the pre-settlement cultivation of the area, Walsh’s chapter affirms sustained occupancy and agricultural use of the land by the Wonnarua people for thousands of years, including and beyond the time when Webber arrives.
Walsh’s family history attempts to counter “colonial storytelling” and seek knowledge that might shake inherited family accounts. At the end of the chapter, he reframes his ancestors’ arrival from the recorded Koori perspective: “When James Webber arrived at Tocal the Gringai were already used to the savage ways of the ‘whites’—those men without women and kinship; with no-one to call mother, father, brother, sister; no-one to touch and show affection; men who violently punished one another […].” 68 This framing reconstructs the scene of contact between Walsh’s ancestor and the Gringai as one where the settler is the violent invader, strange and savage in his ways. Walsh’s family history demonstrates a willingness to interrogate inherited family stories and to see his ancestor’s actions from Indigenous perspectives. Even when the family memory falters, Walsh pursues other sources to consider what dealings his settler ancestors may have had with Indigenous people at that place and time. His book shows the potential for family historians to work critically with the “colonial storytelling” that circulates among kin and to break down the myths that are perpetuated via the repetition of romanticized family tales about settlers and pioneers that serve as both the product and living structure of settler colonialism. Though usually read as a story for one particular family, self-published family histories may bring nuance to the official histories of the nation and provide models for colonial truth-telling.
Family as a Site for Truth-telling
I have argued that family memory is an important but under-studied site for colonial historiography and memory-work via an analysis of diverse narratives within a sample of 85 self-published family histories of “settlement” held in the NLA. As I have shown, family histories offer us an insight into how history is narrated, circulated, and interpreted within families, in ways that illuminate the flows between colonial myths and family memories. While we know many Australians are doing this kind of memory-work on an everyday level, we know very little about how settler families narrate Indigenous-settler histories, and how this impacts their understanding of the link between past and present social inequalities. My analysis of self-published family histories creates a small window into how families narrate their ancestors’ settlement in Australia, based on family memories, local and national histories, and mythologies about the early colonial period.
In these accounts we can see the kind of “colonial storytelling” that Behrendt describes at the civic level happening within families. Stories are passed along family lines with colonial myths knitted into their fibers. In the few histories I have analyzed closely, there are myths of stolen white children, of terra nullius, of nomads with no claim to the uncultivated land, and of upstanding pioneer men building brighter futures for their families. Within these histories there are also counter-stories or deep silences that some family historians are confronting. As a mode of socio-historical reproduction, self-published family histories offer a rich site for analyzing the very different ways that Australians are working with the stories they inherit about colonialism; as people variously silence, justify, defend, rationalize, unravel, pry open, rethink, reframe, and rewrite history. As historian Tom Griffiths writes, “[T]hese forms of history-making have often been overlooked because they were “amateur,” negative, unobserved, gossipy, or genealogical.” But “family history” he adds, needs “to be taken seriously.” 69
In Australia, calls for truth-telling about the colonial past have been stymied at the national level, not least by the government’s rejection of the recommendations put forth in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Though the role of family has not been a major part of the discussion so far, attention to family memory could inform national reckoning processes in two important ways. Firstly, we can gain knowledge about how people’s historical consciousness is informed by inherited stories and their filial (and economic) investment in reaffirming, or at least not dismantling, the stoic pioneer myth. Secondly, we can observe the work that individuals and families are doing to confront and revise inherited stories based on an engagement with counter-histories and with Aboriginal history. In both cases, family becomes a fruitful site for thinking about how colonial myths and memory are transmitted and preserved, as well as how family stories might be harnessed to open up new modes of historiography and truth-telling at the intimate level.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Katie Barclay and Nina Koefoed for the opportunity to workshop the framework for this paper at the AIAS Symposium: Family Memory and Identity in Aarhus. I am also very grateful to Ralph Reid for making me a vital index of the NLA’s holdings, and to NLA reference staff, especially Catriona Anderson and Ralph Sanderson, for their useful advice. Thanks to Ellen Smith and Chris Healy and to JFH’s peer-reviewers for offering valuable comments on drafts of the paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The National Library of Australia and the Stokes Family for generously funding a 2019 Research Fellowship that supported the research.