The question most often posed to historians of ‘Aboriginal history’, by academic scholars and laypersons alike, concerns the availability and nature of sources. In the preface of his pioneering interpretation of the Aboriginal response to the European invasion and settlement of Australia, The Other Side of the Frontier, Henry Reynolds admitted that he was ‘initially … convinced, like many previous Australian scholars, that such a study would be impossible to consummate, that the evidence was too fragmentary to sustain serious scholarship ‘1 While the study of inter-cultural relations is difficult in any colonial context, Australia undoubtedly presents more of a challenge because ‘the records are much poorer’ as Andrew Markus has noted.2 Partly this is because most early contact between Aborigines and Europeans occurred beyond the boundaries of European settlement but it is also due to the fact that Aborigines were pre-literate when the period of sustained colonisation began. Nevertheless, as Reynolds and other historians have learned, a painstaking search of conventional documentary sources — e.g. parliamentary inquiries, official correspondence of government bodies such as the Victorian Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, diaries and journals of ‘explorers’ and pastoralists, letters and reports of missionaries, and writings of ethnographers — can yield a considerable quarry of material in which not only European but also Aboriginal voices can be be heard. This surprising result has led historians such as Reynolds to conclude that: The barriers which for so long kept Aboriginal experience out of our history books were not principally those of source material … but rather those of perception and preference’.3

Insofar as there were problems of sources or methodology — e.g. that Aborigines are seen ‘through the distorting medium of European observation’4 — historians have been apt to claim that these can be surmounted by adopting a more interdisciplinary approach, drawing on archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, etc Much work has been done on this basis, but in a manner which does not disturb a determinedly empirical approach; thus, the theoretical underpinnings of anthropology, for example, with its questioning of ‘how can and do we know what we know of the “other” ‘, are not imbibed. Where the problems of how to ‘read’ sources of Aboriginal-European culture contact have been more rigorously addressed, the sources in question have been oral, not written, and the interlocutors have been (post-structuralist) linguists or anthropologists, rather than historians.5

Unfortunately, few if any historians in ‘Aboriginal history’ have yet to follow their lead,6 and written sources or texts have not been subject to such a deconstructionist reading (or, alternatively, assessment of these does not become properly integrated into our historical analyses). I suspect this is because many historians are wont to assume that these primary sources are ‘primary’ and are, therefore, characterised by ‘authenticity and immediacy’.7 However, as Greg Dening has remarked, while such sources are the ‘least intruded upon by interpretation and organisation … and … are as near the past experience as anything that has survived’, they nevertheless represent a past that is ‘already transformed … already interpreted’: ‘No sooner is the present gone in the blink of an eye or on a breath than we make sense of what has happened. We transform our experience into some narrative’ (or story or text). In other words, ‘the past is made into texts’ and, as Dening emphasises, these ‘mediate the past for historians’ — ‘Histories are the texted past: not the Past, but the texted past.’ This means that ‘historians confronted by “sources” must make a reading of readings, must read the systems (of human culture) and the poetics (of their readings) in the sources’.8

With these maxims in mind, I want to consider here the ‘texted past’ found in a most interesting and unusual source in the La Trobe Collection, the visitors (or visitors') books of two nineteenth-century Gippsland mission stations, Ramahyuck (or Lake Wellington) and Lake Tyers.9 The obvious starting point, as in any source or textual criticism, must be to ask why these particular sources or texts exist, and why they have survived and are available to historians. These ‘visitors books’ were created by a decision of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines in September 1878, at a time when it was under mounting attack for its policy of segregating Aborigines on reserves under missionary superintendence — a goal it had pursued with increasing resolution and vigour since the early 1860s — and, more particularly, for its authoritarian and arbitrary management of one of these reserves, Coranderrk.10 (The very isolated and secluded nature of most of these reserves would probably have aroused the suspicion of outsiders in any case.) The Board found this criticism irksome and sought to counter it in various ways, one of which being a record of visitors’ impressions.11 They apparently believed such a record could be presented as being relatively objective, although they knew, of course, (and acknowledged in another context) that visitors to the Aboriginal stations generally took ‘a very kindly interest’.12 Their favourable impressions were soon utilised by the Board and the missionaries as they cited the most glowing entries in their ‘visitors books’ from ‘distinguished visitors’ in the Board's yearly report to Parliament, on one occasion claiming it to be ‘impartial testimony’ which gave ‘a still clearer insight into the condition of the station(s) and the people’.13

The wish of the Board to have a record of outsiders’ views actually parallels that of the historian since most of the sources concerning missions and reserves are those penned by the missionary superintendents or other insiders; the fact that the history of Aboriginal communities from the mid to late nineteenth century onwards is, as Bob Reece has noted, ‘largely the story of government settlements and church missions’14 makes it all the more important to have sources other than government or missionary ones. This concurrence of desire, however, renders these sources peculiarly problematic for historians.

Why the Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers mission station ‘visitors books’ have been preserved and how they came into such a collection as the La Trobe tells something of the story of these sources, and so is part of a reading of them. Historians do not always enquire as to the provenance of their sources, even though this does often provide useful clues. Both these texts came from private collections: in the case of Ramahyuck, from the late Berta Hagenauer, a granddaughter of the missionaries there, Friedrich and Louise Hagenauer, and the Lake Tyers one from Ian Bulmer, a grandson of missionaries John and Caroline Bulmer. Before these missionary descendants donated these essentially European artefacts to the library they kept them amongst Aboriginal ones — weapons, tools, etc — which, like the ‘visitors books’ themselves, also held memories and told stories for their owners.15 When Berta Hagenauer passed on her collection, a separation took place which is similar to that which often characterises the scholarly study of Aboriginal society; the ‘European’, and principally written, sources — photographs, the family Bible, newspaper clippings, the visitors book, etc — went to a historical collection, the La Trobe, and the ‘Aboriginal’ (material) sources went to an anthropological collection in the Museum of Victoria. This artificial division lessens the possibility of a ‘total history’ while in this case it can serve to mislead the historian by exaggerating the distance in social relations between Aborigines and Europeans in the past; yet the collections of Berta Hagenauer and Ian Bulmer testify to a shared past which some Europeans have had with Aborigines, a life together (although this should not obscure the life apart).

This intimacy or, more accurately, this distant intimacy is evident to some extent in the ‘visitors books’ themselves. This ‘quality of intimacy’ in relationships between Aborigines and Europeans has tended to be overlooked by many historians writing ‘oppositional histories’, as Marie Fels has recently argued in her study of the Native Police Force.16 On some mission stations, bonds of mutual affection and respect undoubtedly developed between missionaries and Aborigines; thus, one long-staying visitor could write of Lake Tyers: ‘Their [the Bulmers'] rule is one of love and they have the interests of the blacks at heart. The blacks will do anything for Mr. B.', while another added: ‘Mr Bulmer the centrepiece is looked up to in everything.’17 Such a close personal relationship was particularly strong on Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers where, unlike any other mission or reserve, these missionary men both founded the missions and laboured there for several decades, achieving a dominance which was due, at least in part, to the force of their personalities — Hagenauer and Bulmer were regarded by many visitors as the ‘right men in the right place’. Both ‘visitors books’ are testimony to the missionaries’ ‘good works’ and read like hymns of praise. A reading of these texts also indicates that their official purpose was subverted or submerged by the personal: they became the Hagenauers’ visitors book and the Bulmers’ visitors book. As this might suggest, Europeans did not visit the Aborigines so much as the missionaries’ domains or the missionaries themselves.

These factors together suggest the appropriateness of these sources becoming the property of the missionaries and their descendants rather than of the Board who actually legally owned them since they were an official or governmental record; it also seems unremarkable that of the six ‘visitors books’ only those of Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers are, to my knowledge, extant. The donors made these sources available to historians for the same reasons, of course, for which they were created: to tell a story as the missionaries or the board wanted it to be told, for they felt it was a past/present which they could be proud of and/or which needed to be defended.18

With any sources, whether private or public (and it is hard to categorise these visitors books in either of these terms), there are, of course, conventions which determine how historical actors inscribe the past and which thus influence what is inscribed, but this is particularly true of these texts. The books themselves were symbols of the ‘civilisation’ which the missionaries and the board hoped visitors would perceive on the mission stations; like many Bibles, they were bound in black leather and embossed in gold lettering — VISITORS BOOKS; these were texts which could not be read or written in without due solemnity. Within, their format made even clearer the rules which shaped the inscriptions for they were divided up, at the Board's direction, in this manner: date of visit; name; object of visit; remarks. (The ruled lines across and down each page might be seen to echo the sense of order the missionaries sought to inculcate in their Aboriginal ‘charges’.) Few visitors would have needed such guidance since the convention of ‘visitors books’ dictated that it was a matter of form or civility to be grateful for hospitality and admiring of one's hosts; the forgetful would be reminded of this as soon as they looked at the book, as one man testified: ‘Having read the other reports I most heartily endorse their praises. I felt very much impressed … ‘19

The structure of paradigms within which visitors inscribed their ‘remarks’ mirrored the nature of their visits, for they were invariably guided around the missions by the missionaries according to a fixed pattern, having ‘every matter of interest’ explained.20 The routine on Ramahyuck, for example, went something like this: the attention of visitors was drawn first of all to the overall layout of the mission settlement with its orderly and regulated neatness; they were then escorted to the schoolrooms where they would find Aboriginal scholars in class and be expressly shown the neatest copybooks; from there they might go out into the fields, in particular to where the men were working in the much-heralded arrowroot and hop cultivations; they would return to the settlement itself and what was called the ‘village green’, where visitors would find cosy looking cottages, lined by pretty flower gardens in the front, where the women could be found standing on their thresholds, perhaps proudly holding their newborn black babies swathed in European white clothes; the last port of call was the church, where the Aboriginal congregation never failed to delight with their beautiful singing and seemingly devout attention to ‘the word of God’. The carefully managed nature of these visits made it difficult for outsiders to have any significant contact with the Aboriginal inmates who, not surprisingly, remain anonymous in this source — only two or three of their names are mentioned in all the entries.

It seems reasonable to conclude that both the nature of these visits and the sources which record them render the ‘remarks’ of visitors of little value if our object is to gain insight into the cultural experience of these enclosed worlds, especially were we to try to understand it from the Aborigines’ perspective(s). These sources clearly tell us much more about Europeans than Aborigines, the observers rather than the observed, and in particular about the way Europeans constructed ‘Aboriginal people in their absence’.21 Once this is acknowledged, they can be used to examine European racial ideas and attitudes, the study of which is still in its infancy — most studies lack sophistication and concentrate on elite opinion to the neglect of popular views.22

The commencement of these ‘visitors books’ coincided more or less with the extension of the railway into Gippsland and the subsequent popularity of both train and steamboat excursions for Melburnians. Both missions attracted a large number of visitors, and ‘all classes’ were represented according to one of the missionaries.23 They drew a slightly different ‘audience’, however; by this time Ramahyuck had won a reputation as the best managed mission station in the colony, and this brought many churchmen and other missionaries to observe it; overseas worthies such as Anthony Trollope were also lured there, while ethnographers and scientists visited to ‘inspect’ the Aborigines; photographers such as C. W. Walter went in search of a new subject. Lake Tyers attracted fewer such visitors and more casual sightseers, especially as the beauty of the lake became more widely known. (Photographer Nicholas Caire opined: ‘I have visited most of the wild and romantic places in Victoria, and can conscientiously say that there are few spots to equal Lake Tyers for natural beauty.’)24

The responses of many of these visitors, I would argue, occurred within what J. G. A. Pocock would call ‘a certain paradigmatic situation’25, one which is shaped by the modes of colonial racial thought. There are two easily distinguishable racial idioms concerning Aborigines apparent in the second half of the nineteenth century: a humanitarian one shaped by the Enlightenment and evangelical Christianity which held that Aborigines were capable of being ‘civilised and christianised’ and that Europeans were morally obliged to compensate and care for the dispossessed; and a more secular one, increasingly expressed in the language of Social Darwinism, which held that Aborigines were ‘a dying race’ and that Europeans either should (or could) not alter ‘the laws of nature’. These ‘visitors books’ provide evidence of both, although particularly the former.

Humanitarians such as churchmen and other missionaries went to Ramahyuck (and Lake Tyers) wanting and hoping to see Aborigines becoming ‘Europeans’; accordingly they were most struck by the emblems of their own middle-class religious culture — of particular appeal was the established settlement of whitewashed cottages, church, school, etc., while less tangible but no less impressive was the sense of time and order, the ‘good management’ of the missionaries, the industry of the Aborigines, their apparently ‘happy appearance’, and the scholastic ability of the children. This heartened such visitors for a number of reasons: most importantly, perhaps, it suggested that Europeans and Aborigines could be brought together into ‘a shared moral universe’26, a social order which integrated every ‘class’ and ‘race’. Secondly, the illusion that Aborigines were becoming like themselves, men and women made in their own image, cheered their hearts and happily reinforced their sense of European cultural superiority; lastly, it bolstered them in their faith, since here Aborigines were seemingly being ‘christianised’ and thus civilised, as one churchman wrote: ‘Like the deputies, who visited Samaria and saw the grace of God, I am glad. Truly God has done good things by the hand of his dear servants working here’.27

The continuing influence of humanitarianism is most evident in these sources, a phenomenon largely unacknowledged by historians, who generally see Social Darwinism as overwhelming more benevolent opinion concerning Aborigines. This later perspective is nonetheless also borne out here with remarks such as ‘[came] to see how the last of the Victorian Natives were treated’.28 More critical exponents of Social Darwinian imperatives, however, chose to express their opinions in other forums; in this regard, as in other ways already suggested, the Board's labelling of these texts as ‘visitors books’ rather than ‘visitors’ books’ reflects the fact that they were the missions’ record of visitors more than they were the visitors’ record of the missions. Journalist John Stanley James, for example, merely wrote in the Ramahyuck book, ‘See Argus’, saving his strident criticisms for the press,29 while another critic, local anthropologist A. W. Howitt, was more circumspect, only too aware that his views were ‘not in accordance with recent prejudices’ and unwilling to jeopardise his working relationships with the missionaries — he saved his scepticism ‘as to the utility of these missions’ for a private circle of family and friends.30 (Another ethnographer, James Dawson was also critical of the Board's segregation policy but was more impressed by these missions, although in both books he is more revealing of himself than of what he ‘saw’, describing himself as ‘author of Dawson's Australian Aborigines'.)31

One needs to consider the importance of these two racial paradigms in shaping what visitors ‘saw’, or in other words the reader of these texts needs to expose and examine the role of racial ideology in shaping the way Europeans regarded Aborigines. In a context where Europeans seldom met Aborigines and then only in mediated circumstances such as these, pre-existing expectations seem to have been of overwhelming importance; this is particularly suggested by the comments of one visitor to Ramahyuck, who was allowed the luxury of a lengthy ‘remark’: he was sure that Aborigines on the mission ‘thoroughly understood’ their religious teachings and applied these ‘in their daily life’, and since abandoning ‘their former nomadic life’ they had attained a standard ‘on the level’ with the average selector; all in all, in the fifteen years since he had last been on Ramahyuck, there was ‘a very marked improvement’ among the Aborigines there. This said, however, he bluntly added: ‘Before the advance of civilisation, the race may doubtless become extinct. It is gratifying, however, to see the last days of the Aboriginal inhabitants of this colony are made as happy as possible’.32 Experience and dogma clearly contradicted each other here, but popular racial theories swayed this colonist's perceptions more than the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

Not all visitors, however, came with such ready preconceptions; other evidence here suggests that many colonists were either uninfluenced or unfamiliar with these common racial paradigms, except perhaps for a vague conception of Aborigines as ‘savages’. Without such ideological structures, it seems these visitors lacked a language within which to frame or articulate any substantive impressions — thus, many of the ‘remarks’ recorded are startingly brief, even when allowance is made for the small space in which they had to write. This comparative absence of serious comment could be also read as evidence of the extent to which Aborigines were ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for many urban dwellers, and might lead us to conclude, however tentatively, that in the later decades of the nineteenth century Europeans’ ignorance and indifference about Aborigines was as common or more common than any other racial perspective. Some evidence in these sources does lead me to speculate that this was truer for working-class colonists than it was for the middle-class; the latter seem to be more aware of racial ideas (and hence saw the Aborigines and recorded what they saw through those paradigms).

Whatever their class background though, the acts of visiting and of inscribing their impressions of the visit testify to the distance between these European interlopers and the Aboriginal inmates of the missions, and to the former's power or dominance. Many, even most, visitors unashamedly recorded their ‘object of visit’ in terms such as ‘curiosity’ and ‘to see the natives’, and left their patronising remarks without any apparent thought to how Aborigines either regarded them or their comments: Aborigines were the vulnerable objects of what could be called ‘the European gaze’, an uncivil or uncivilised staring at ‘the other’ — a voyeurism which imprisons the ‘other’ — which the gentility of a ‘visitors book’ should not be allowed to obscure. The objectification of Aborigines apparent in the ‘visitors books’ might be compared with the way people see the ‘insane’ in mental asylums or animals in a zoo; this was the opinion of anthropologist Norman B. Tindale who, after visiting Lake Tyers many years later (in the 1940s), complained that tourists regarded the reserve as a ‘kind of zoological garden and place of amusement where aborigines and near-aborigines can be seen and discussed almost as though they were an animal species’.33 Many years earlier John Stanley James or ‘The Vagabond’ was similarly angered — he feared that Lake Tyers was at risk of becoming ‘a show place, an appanage to the hotels at the Lakes Entrance’ who were running excursions to the mission, damned their disruption of ‘the discipline’ on the station, and complained of the way the Aborigines were degraded by being ‘made a show of’; the ‘sublime impertinence’ of their ‘supremely idiotic’ comments in the ‘visitors book’ particularly annoyed the journalist. They took away souvenirs and memories and would ‘talk about the blacks for months afterwards. They had been amused …’;34 the threat of their ‘otherness’ had been defused by humour.

There is an element of hypocrisy in these criticisms, however — a class or culture-based distinction between the casual working-class ‘tourists’ and the serious middle-class ‘scientific’ observer. However, both groups were subjecting Aborigines to ‘the European gaze’; Tindale's anthropological research, for example, involved studying the Aborigines’ physiology — a measuring of their bodies — as a supposedly objective assessment of their capacity for ‘civilisation’, while photographers such as Walter and Caire sold their images of Aborigines as photographs or postcards (which usually partook of one or other of the two racial paradigms and so helped to perpetuate these preconceptions and the objectification of ‘the Aborigines’).

The Aborigines were not, however, the passive victims of these European interlopers, although one cannot learn much of their responses from these visitors books. One visitor to Lake Tyers noted, enigmatically, the ‘audible smiles’ of the Aborigines there,35 but the meaning of this reaction seems to have eluded her. To decipher the message behind the mask of these smiles, to understand how Aborigines themselves understood the looks and texts of these interlopers, we have to read other sources, particularly oral ones — although we have to learn how to read those sources first of all.

Bain Attwood teaches Australian history at Monash University and his book, The Making of the Aborigines (Allen & Unwin), will be published in 1989.