Introduction
In recent years there has been a quickening of interest in the study of Victorian Aboriginal culture. This upsurge has resulted in the publication of many books and journal articles, and the completion of many theses, on subjects as diverse as prehistoric Aboriginal society and Aboriginal-European relationships in the post-contact situation. The increased output has been due to a number of factors, including the creation of a state government archaeology department, the development of an archaeology department at La Trobe University, increased amateur involvement in the field, and a general raising of public consciousness about the value of Aboriginal culture.
Whatever the cause, a major contributing role in providing a database for these studies has been played by the La Trobe Library, particularly through its holdings of source material in the form of manuscripts. In this paper I wish to examine one such source, the Victorian journals of George Augustus Robinson, and show why it is of particular importance.
Robinson was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Victoria from 1839 to 1849, and an indefatigable correspondent and diarist. The original manuscript of his voluminous diary for this ten year period is held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Since 1976 a microfilm copy has been held in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the La Trobe Library. In recent years a number of annotated extracts from the ten year Victorian journal have been published,
1 but the major part exists only in manuscript form. Before looking at this diary in detail, it is worth considering briefly both its context in Victorian Aboriginal studies, and its author.
Because of the very rapid dislocation of traditional Aboriginal culture in south eastern Australia, at a time before the development of ethnography as a field discipline, there were no ethnographic studies (as such) made of Aborigines in this region. Studies of Australian Aborigines feature centrally in the developmental history of ethnography but all such studies were done on groups living in the arid centre of Australia or in the northern regions. However there was little similarity in the way of life of these people and that of Aboriginal groups in the temperate parts of Australia such as Victoria and eastern New South Wales. For this reason, in Victoria historical sources of a particular kind have assumed a greater importance in reconstructions of prehistoric Aboriginal life, and have been used increasingly by prehistorians in the past few years.
2These sources take a variety of forms, depending on the circumstances of compilation. They include first hand observation by early settlers, sometimes recorded from memories of events which occurred decades earlier
3; information collected from available Aboriginal informants
4; and observations recorded at the time in diaries, field notes and official reports.
5 This last group contain the most useful sources because, despite the lack of training on the part of the writers, observations were direct and the recording virtually immediate.
George Augustus Robinson's journals are of this type. Within the early history of Victoria the entire document is significant, for the observations it contains on landscape and settlers. But the most interesting and valuable entries from the point of view of Aboriginal studies are those he made while in the field — where he was able to observe firsthand the material evidence of traditional Aboriginal culture. The daily entries made during Robinson's field trips are also generally the longest.
Sources of this type are essentially historical but in many recent works by prehistorians they fulfil the role of ethnographic studies which were never made.
6 Within academic circles such first hand observations have come to be called ‘ethno-history’, in that they relate the history of an ethnic group different from that of the writer. The epistemological status of ethno-history is a matter of debate — is it a discreet academic discipline? is it ethnography serving history? or vice versa? However, as will be shown here, its value to Aboriginal studies (even if merely as a convenient database) cannot be denied.
G. A. ROBINSON
In March 1839 George Robinson arrived in Port Phillip to head the newly formed Aboriginal Protectorate. He was 50 years old and had about ten years direct experience of Aboriginal culture in Tasmania. Between 1829 and 1838 he had been instrumental in having the Tasmanian Aborigines removed from their traditional land to a settlement on Flinders Island, where he subsequently presided over their demise. He was a complex person, seemingly capable of simultaneously accommodating generally irreconcilable beliefs about the value to Aborigines of his own work. He came closer than most of his contemporaries to seeing that the essential nature of Aboriginal society is the relationship its members have with their land. He also notes in many places the injustice of Europeans taking the land. But he still proceeded with the scheme to collect Aboriginal clans on established Protectorate Stations.
Robinson has been the subject of a great deal of study and comment in the past couple of years, including an essentially uncomplimentary biography
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by Vivienne Rae-Ellis
7. His own journal entries show him as pompous and self-opinionated. He was generally disliked by his contemporaries and it is probably true to say (as B. Plomley does, quoting A. A. Milne), that Robinson ‘was not a nice man’.
8 However the fact that he wasn't a likeable person shouldn't preclude a fair and unbiased assessment of his work and very real achievements. Robinson, for all his faults, deserves better than Rae-Ellis gives him.
The circumstances of Robinson's writing of his Victorian field journals are interesting in themselves. As the administrative head of the Protectorate, with Assistants stationed in rural districts, Robinson theoretically had little need to travel in the line of duty. It is fair to ask then, why did he spend such long periods, sometimes months, trekking to almost all parts of the colony of Port Phillip, supposedly in the line of duty?
The answer mostly lies with Robinson's character. It is not however that Robinson lacked the will to do anything else, and wandered through the bush in order to escape the problems of the Protectorate.
9 There is no doubt that the Protectorate had problems but if Robinson lacked anything it was not will; it was faith in his Assistants’ ability to carry out their jobs. Of Edward Parker (the Assistant Protector for the Loddon District), he wrote:
Mr P. is very indolent and loitering; a gossip, but little good to the blacks and no energy. Has no executive; little good will be done by him.
10Coupled with this type of feeling about his staff, he had an inflated opinion about his own ability. He simply believed he could do a better job than anybody else, and took every opportunity to try and prove it. His plan of action for contacting the Aborigines of Port Phillip and persuading them to congregate on the Protectorate stations was based entirely on his method of operation in Tasmania. His reasoning was simple: it had worked in the former situation; it should work again. So he set about directly contacting as many Aborigines as he could.
There can be little doubt that Robinson seriously misread the situation, and certainly he was both out of his depth and without any real support. But as he travelled through the bush seeking out Aborigines, and at the same time compiling the massive journal which today stands (ironically) as the one great achievement of the Protectorate, he was still a man driven by a desire, albeit misguided, to do good for the Aborigines — and by reflection for himself.
The Value Of The Journal
The almost unparalleled value of Robinson's journal as a primary source of information on traditional Victorian Aboriginal culture can be demonstrated in two ways. Firstly, we can assess it from an essentially quantitative point of view — we can look at the amount, type and range of information that it contains. In this way it will be clear that for a number of reasons the journal is unique in Victoria. Secondly, we can measure the value of the journal in terms of the use to which it has been put. Here it will be shown that Robinson's diary sheds light on several previously unclear areas of Aboriginal studies.
From the point of view of its informational content, there are four aspects which give Robinson's journal a greater value than most contemporaneous sources. The first of these is that the recorded observations are made in a wide range of locations. From his first trip, to the Loddon and Campaspe Rivers region of central Victoria in 1840, to his 1849 trip to Lake Colac, Robinson walked or rode more than 10,000 miles in south eastern Australia. During these trips he travelled through almost every part of the colony, always recording what he saw, not only of Aboriginal material culture, but of the landcape.
The second advantageous feature of Robinson's journal, a corollary of the first, is the time depth inherent in the document. The ten years of operation of the Aboriginal Protectorate were vitally important ones in relations between Europeans and Aborigines, and the inevitable disruption to Aboriginal culture. In the period which separates Robinson's first diary comment in Victoria from his last, there were massive changes wrought on traditional Aboriginal society. In some cases whole clans ceased to exist,
11 and everywhere there was a dramatic decrease in Aboriginal population. Robinson was a participating witness to this demise and his notes and observations are a vital reference source.
The third aspect of the journal which is noteworthy is the descriptions which Robinson gives of a variety of Aboriginal artefacts, events and practices. In ten years of travel and observation, he was witness to a wide range of economic and ceremonial practices, for some of which there is little or no extant material evidence. Examples are not difficult to find. Between May and July 1841, in the western district, Robinson saw and described in great detail a couple of ingenious methods which the local Aboriginal clans had devised for catching fish and eels.
12 The structures which he saw have long since been destroyed by the farming practices of Europeans. Thus what we know of the operation of these fish traps comes almost entirely from Robinson's journal accounts of their appearance and use.
Some of the scenes Robinson describes were unique, and their like will never be witnessed again. In this category we can put his sometimes detailed recounting of corroborees (for instance on 4 June 1841), and a meeting of ‘chiefs’ near Mount Weevort on 3 August 1841.
Finally, Robinson not only described features of Aboriginal life — he also drew sketches of many of them. From an artistic perspective Robinson's illustrations leave something to be desired but in many cases they have the invaluable function of being the only known graphic representations of their subject. Moreover, as with the corroborees which
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Robinson described, some of the subjects of his sketches were fleeting and unlikely to leave any permanent evidence. Within the journal entry for 18 April 1841, for example, are six separate drawings of body and face markings corresponding with clan affiliation in the area of Lake Keilambete in the western district. Following enormous disruption to clan groupings in that area in the 1840s, such identifying characteristics ceased to be functional and now exist only in Robinson's journal.
