Colonization and the Manufacture of Dependence in Australia
- Lilou HARDONNIERE
- 17 hours ago
- 2 min read
by Thomas Landerretche
With the first British fleets arriving in Terra Australis carrying convicts, the process of colonization and settlement by the British Empire occurred. Despite initial resistance against the colonists, most notably the one led by Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy, the epidemics, added with the mass killings of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population by the colonists, effectively led to the dismantlement of local indigenous communities and permanently altered their economic and socio-cultural structures, customs, and traditions.
Colonization settled its claws into the Australian continent, bringing with it the pastoral industry. In the 19th century, its exponential expansion drastically changed not only the Australian physical territory but also indigenous traditional land practices. Charles Dunford Rowley explores in his 1972 book The Destruction of Aboriginal Society how cattle “stock occupied the waterholes, drove off the game, ate out the seed-bearing grasses, and generally upset the somewhat precarious balance of nature”. With this upset in Australia’s ecosystem, the first nations’ populations were unable to continue their traditional agricultural and hunting practices. This loss in first nations practices of sustainable land usage was further exacerbated by the dispossession of the first peoples from the waterholes, which were essential to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander food production systems before colonization.
With the drastic change in Australia’s fauna, the indigenous populations were facing starvation, creating the condition of economic dependency. Indeed, hunger was a large factor in attracting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to pastoral stations and Christian missions. As the first peoples were displaced from their land, which had been used to nourish them, they became dependent on the settlers’ institutions, such as pastoral stations and Christian missions, for food. This led to the exploitation of first peoples labor as the effects of settler colonialism erased the indigenous practices around land usage. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were forced to not only adapt to this Eurocentric economic model by joining the colonial slave labor, but also be dependent on it for their survival.
Tragically, colonial exploitation of Australia’s natural resources led to a cycle fostering indigenous dependency on the Empire’s economic model: through European exploitation of the land’s raw materials, there was a loss in traditional agricultural practices, which forced starving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to congregate around Eurocentric economic institutions, which itself alienated them from their traditional economies and practices. This cycle of worsening economic indigenous dependency on extractive Western institutions was facilitated through legal and political frameworks.
Sources
National Museum of Australia. “Pemulwuy | National Museum of Australia.” Nma.gov.au, 18 Nov. 2022.
White, John. “Smallpox Outbreak.” Www.sl.nsw.gov.au, 2022.
Rowley, Charles Dunford. The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, 1970.
Watts, David. “A Brief Aboriginal History.” Aboriginal Heritage Office, 2008.
