Breaker Morant
I wrote this article in February 2002 in response to a campaign by Senator Julian McGauran and Tim Fischer to obtain a pardon for English officer “Breaker” Morant, who ordered the killing of prisoners in the Anglo/South African War.
I was annoyed that McGauran took up this issue without any community consultation. It was the only time I heard him get any publicity for anything, until he quit the Nationals to join the Libs. He hasn’t been heard from since.
Breaker Morant doesn’t deserve a pardon
The current campaign seeking a posthumous pardon for Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock is a distasteful exercise in popularism. Although the two men shouldn’t have been shot by firing squad, they clearly deserved punishment for their actions.
I’m an Australian partly of Dutch descent. My wife is an Afrikaner. We believe that many people with South African connections, and others who value human life, share our objection to Morant being pardoned.
The fact is that he executed Boer prisoners. Whether he did so under orders is irrelevant. Nazi soldiers who killed Jews were also acting under orders.
Putting ourselves in Morant’s position, it is possible we might partially excuse him given the brutal loss of his comrade, Captain Hunt, and the guerrilla nature of what was then a dirty phase in a lingering, dirty war. However, I’d like to think we definitely would not have participated in the killing of a missionary, as Morant did.
The German missionary, Reverend Hess, had Boer sympathies, but the motive for his death was to cover up the crime he discovered. The fact this motive existed proves that Morant knew it was wrong to kill the prisoners.
It’s become fashionable in Australia to regard Morant, who was English, as some sort of romantic folk hero. It’s unfortunate this sentimental tendency has distorted our collective memory of the Boer War.
Britain didn’t need Australia’s help to defeat the small group of Afrikaner farmers who dared to fight the Empire for their independence, but thousands of our young men rushed overseas to join what they considered an adventure.
Their enthusiasm makes Australia equally culpable, with Britain, for the atrocities which were committed in the later stages of the war.
The war wasn’t justified. The Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State were internationally recognised as sovereign nations. Britain wanted control of their diamonds and gold.
After their official surrender some belligerent, fiercely nationalist Boers in rural areas continued to wage a guerrilla struggle against the British and Australian troops.
You have to admire these frontier people and the value they placed on their freedom.
Lord Kitchener’s infamous response was a “scorched earth” policy. Boer women and children were herded into unsanitary concentration camps where thousands of them died.
This holocaust remains among the greatest unanswered war crimes of the 20th century. It’s a stain on our history comparable with the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.
Australia was a federated, autonomous nation at the time our soldiers implemented Kitchener’s unforgivable strategy. This left a bitter legacy in South Africa that arguably contributed later to the establishment of apartheid.
The hatred between white majority Afrikaners and people of British descent was a key factor in the South African National Party’s rise to power in 1948.
We should acknowledge our inglorious past rather than seeking to elevate the status of someone who was rightly punished for committing murder.
Angus McMillan
I published this article in April 2002 on the original Alpine News web site. It attracted considerable interest, including a call from researchers producing a BBC documentary for Scottish Television. It seems topical in 2008 given the “sorry” debate.
Angus McMillan no saint nor devil
The Age reported on Saturday (April 27, 2002) that a group of do-gooders in Warragul want to change the name of the federal electorate of McMillan. Apparently it’s because Angus McMillan, who explored much of Gippsland in the 1840s, was unkind to Aborigines.
I grew up in Traralgon, where a cairn at the town’s eastern entrance marks the passing of McMillan on his way to Port Albert. He was the first white settler and opened up the district to agriculture. I’ve read local history, including the moving “Kurnai of Gippsland”, which traces the sad plight of Aborigines in the region.
There’s no doubt that McMillan was involved in the killing of some blacks, and he wasn’t the best “protector of Aborigines” going around either. But to use the cliche, he was “a man of his times”. He can’t be judged by today’s standards.
John Howard and Geoffrey Blainey have spoken about the “black armband view” of Australian history and how there’s a modern tendency to reflect with shame on our early settlement.
I believe you have to consider history in its proper context. The lifestyle for most white people in 1850 wasn’t exactly affluent by today’s standards. There was widespread poverty, not much respect for civil rights and little welfare support. If you were Catholic in the United Kingdom you had even fewer rights than most other people.
The convicts were treated most brutally. The Scots were displaced from their Highlands and the New World beckoned.
The Scotsmen who settled Gippsland with McMillan spoke Gaelic and saw an opportunity to redeem their stolen lands in a new continent. It’s ironic they dispossessed another people to obtain this land, but that’s what happened.
The Aborigines had rights under the law, but in Gippsland at that time there was no law. The settlers were entering virgin country, as they saw it, before the surveyors, town planners and machinery of government. They had to survive against the elements and hostile Aborigines.
When I reflect on history I like to apply the test of asking myself what I would have done in the same circumstances.
For example, if I’d been a soldier in the army of Alexander the Great, would I have felt guilty about looting and pillaging my way through Asia Minor? Not a chance; it would have been one of the perks.
If I’d been a Private in the German Army of 1940, would I have taken orders to kill Jews? I like to think that I wouldn’t have, but who’s to say … upbringing, peer group and other pressures would come to bear. At worst, if I had followed orders, I hope my conscience would never have forgiven me.
Going back to the bush frontier of 1840 it’s more clear cut. The political and religious leaders of that time saw Aborigines as a primitive people who could not be elevated to civilised society. It was believed they were inferior. A settler trying to earn his way would most certainly have regarded the lives of his cattle as more precious than those of the blacks. He would have lived in fear of reprisals, thinking it’s “them or me”. They were fighting a type of war.
McMillan was pragmatic and a survivor. He did what he thought was best and right. His conscience, and those of the people around him, would not have pricked at the loss of Aboriginal lives. That’s wrong by today’s standards, but few would have held that view in 1840.
McMillan deserves to be remembered as the pioneer that he was; a trailblazer who opened up fertile country to settlement.
The Aborigines who lost their lives and land also deserve to be remembered, as they are in many place names, and perhaps through the future erection of a suitable monument.
But wiping McMillan’s name from history is not appropriate.
The republic
I was invited recently to speak at a conference in Albury on the notion that Australia should have more states or regional government. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend.
The organiser had seen a letter I wrote to the Border Mail regarding the republic issue.
I can’t find the letter, but in essence I said that changing our head of state was cosmetic and unnecessary; that the role of states was a bigger constitutional challenge and more real in its everyday significance.
I’ve wavered over several years on the republic. The position I keep coming back to is that I can’t see any reason to change except symbolism. It then becomes an argument about tradition.
My Irish surname suggests I shouldn’t wish to retain the monarchy in this country, but that’s a furphy. Most Irish were loyalist or apathetic until Easter 1916.
For me the symbolism of our constitution is greater than the individual monarch or what happened in recent generations.
I like the fact we can visibly trace our political, legal and social development back over a thousand years. We inherited a fine system of government and nobody has yet established a better system than representative democracy under the Crown.
Part of the problem with today’s debate is that the symbols aren’t properly taught or respected.
It isn’t “tugging your forelock” or unpatriotic to respect the head of state as the new breed of left wing nationalists would have us believe.
Twenty years ago there were oaths of allegiance and photographs of the Queen in public places. You rarely hear a loyal toast today and few places display the Queen’s picture.
The Labor Party, and in particular the Socialist Left faction, is driving the agenda with support from the loony Far Left. Most other people are apathetic or sympathetic. Few feel strongly enough to challenge the prevailing wind of public opinion.
That’s why I’d like to broaden the debate to include real constitutional reform. If we must change let’s make it meaningful.
Changing the head of state will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Just think about it: coinage, military uniforms, navy ships, government stationery, the Coat of Arms, Victorian flag, etc.
If you ask at a referendum if Australia should become a republic, most people will answer yes.
If you ask: Should taxes rise and a billion dollars be spent to make a cosmetic change to the Constitution? I know what the answer would be.
I say we shouldn’t become a republic unless we also seriously address the issue of more states (or regional government) and the power of states and local government.
Hello world!
This is my first time at posting a blog, or “web log” for those of you who have no idea what I’m writing about.
I first heard about blogs during the Gulf War. Apparently they were a useful source of independent comment, news and discussion. That’s the great thing about the Internet. It enables you to publish anything you like for no charge.
Then I read an article in The Age about blogs and how popular they were becoming. Hundreds of thousands of people have them. The Age mentioned a blog script, which required knowledge of CGI. I experimented with it and got the thing working, but I wasn’t ready to go live.
The fact I managed to run a CGI script inspired me to fiddle around with other scripts. Eventually this led me to rebuild the Alpine News web site.
I became bolder with each success and challenged by each failure. I managed to run a couple of small PHP scripts for web forms. I wanted something to record local weather data, and in searching for that I somehow came across Jonathon Beckett’s Blog script. You can download this and see his site here.
I loved the layout and simplicity of the script, so launched into my first attempt at running an SQL database. There were a couple of server glitches, not caused by me, and here we are.
So what can you expect to read here. Unlike some other blogs I won’t be bearing my soul and giving a racy “warts and all” daily diary.
Instead you will find my observations and comments on current events … boring stuff most likely. So why I am doing it?
Good question. That might become clearer to me as this blog unfolds.
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