Superior

There was more to this than culture shock. Bewilderment – or rather, an unwillingness to try and understand the continent’s original inhabitants – suited Europeans in the eighteenth century because it also served the belief that they were entering a territory they could justly claim for themselves. The landscape was thought to be no different from how it must have been in the beginning, because they couldn’t recognise how it might have been changed. And if the land hadn’t been cultivated, then by Western legal measures it was terra nullius, it didn’t belong to anyone.

By the same token, if its inhabitants belonged to the past, to a time before modernity, their days were numbered. ‘Indigenous Australians were considered to be primitive, a fossilised stage in human evolution,’ I’m told by Billy Griffiths, a young Australian historian who has documented the story of archaeology in his country, challenging the narrative that once painted indigenous peoples as an evolutionary backwater. At least one early explorer even refused to believe they had created the rock art he saw. They were viewed as ‘an earlier stage of western history, a living representative of an ancient form, a stepping stone’. From almost the first encounter, Aboriginal Australians were judged to have no history of their own, surviving in isolation as a flashback to how all humans might have lived before some became civilised. In 1958 the late distinguished Australian archaeologist John Mulvaney wrote that Victorians saw Australia as a ‘museum of primeval humanity’. Even until the end of the twentieth century writers and scholars routinely called them ‘Stone Age’ people.

It’s true that indigenous cultures have enduring connections to their ancestors, a continuation of traditions that go back millennia. ‘The deep past is a living heritage,’ Griffiths tells me. For Aboriginal Australians, ‘it’s something they feel in their bones … there are amazing stories of dramatic events that are preserved in oral histories, oral traditions, such as the rising of the seas at the end of the last ice age, and hills becoming islands, the eruption of volcanoes in western Victoria, even meteorites in different times.’ But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that ways of life have never changed. European colonisers failed to see this and it would take until the second half of the twentieth century for that view to be corrected.

‘There was certainly little respect for the remarkable systems of understanding and land management that indigenous Australians had cultivated over millennia,’ explains Griffiths. For thousands of years the land has been embedded with stories and songs, cultivated with digging sticks, fire and hand. ‘While people have lived in Australia, there’s been enormous environmental change as well as social change, political change, cultural change.’ Their lives have never been static. In his 2014 book Dark Emu, Black Seeds, writer Bruce Pascoe argues, as other scholars have done, that this engagement with the land was so sophisticated and successful, including the harvesting of crops and fish, that it amounted to farming and agriculture.

But whatever they saw, the colonisers didn’t value. For those raised in and around cities, industrialisation is still what represents civilisation. ‘The idea of ranking, say, an industrial society higher than a hunter-gatherer society is absurd,’ reminds Benjamin Smith. It’s not easy to accept when you’ve grown up in a society that tells you concrete skyscrapers are the symbols of advanced culture, but when viewed from the perspective of deep time – across millennia rather than centuries, in the context of long historical trajectories – it becomes clearer. Empires and cities decline and fall. It is smaller, indigenous communities that have survived throughout, those whose societies date to many thousands rather than many hundreds of years. ‘Archaeology shows us that all societies are incredibly sophisticated, they are just sophisticated in different ways,’ Smith continues. ‘These are the world’s thinkers, and maybe they thought themselves into a better place. They have societies that have more leisure time than Western societies, lower suicide rates, higher standards of living in many ways, even though they don’t have all of the technological sophistication.’

Respect for and pride in indigenous cultures has only started to build in the last few decades. And even now, there remains resistance among some non-indigenous Australians, especially as it has become clear from archaeological evidence that Aboriginal people have been occupying this territory not for just thousands of years, but for many tens of thousands. ‘The mid-twentieth century revelation that people were here for that kind of depth of time … was received in many ways as a challenge to a settler nation with a very shallow history. There are cultural anxieties wrapped up in all of this,’ says Griffiths. ‘It challenges the legitimacy of white presence here.’

Among European colonists in the nineteenth century, there was a failure to engage with those they encountered, to accept them as the true inhabitants of the land, combined with a mercenary hastiness to write them off. Alongside the native people of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, whose nakedness and apparent savagery had shocked biologist Charles Darwin when he saw them on his travels, indigenous Australians and Tasmanians were seen as occupying the lowest rungs in the human racial hierarchy. One observer described them as ‘descending to the grave’. They were, Griffiths tells me, seen as doomed to go extinct. ‘That was the dominant concept, that they would soon die out.

‘There was a lot of talk of smoothing the pillow of a dying race.’

Smoothing the pillow was bloodthirsty work. Disease was the greatest killer, the forerunner of invasion. But starting in September 1794, six years after the First Fleet of British ships arrived in what would become Sydney, and continuing into the twentieth century, hundreds of massacres also helped to slowly and steadily shrink the indigenous population by around 80 per cent, according to some estimates. Many hundreds of thousands of people died, if not of smallpox and other illnesses shipped to Australia, then directly at the hands of individuals or gangs, and at other times of police. Equally harsh was the cultural genocide, adds Griffiths. There were bans on the practice of culture and use of language. ‘Many people hid their identity, which also contributed to the decline in population.’

In 1869 the Australian government passed legislation allowing children to be forcibly taken away from their parents, particularly if they were of mixed heritage – described at the time as ‘half-caste’, ‘quarter-caste’ and smaller fractions. An official inquiry into the effects of this policy on the indelibly scarred ‘Stolen Generations’, finally published in 1997, is a catalogue of horrors. In Queensland and Western Australia, people were forced onto government settlements and missions, children removed from about the age of four and placed in dormitories, before being sent off to work at fourteen. ‘Indigenous girls who became pregnant were sent back to the mission or dormitory to have their child. The removal process then repeated itself.’

By the 1930s, around half of Queensland’s Aboriginal Australian population was living in institutions. Life was bleak, with high rates of illness and malnutrition; behaviour was strictly policed for fear that they would return to the ‘immoral’ ways of their home communities. Children were able to leave dormitories and missions only to provide cheap labour, the girls as domestic servants and the boys as farm labourers. They were considered mentally unsuited to any other kind of work. Historian Meg Parsons describes what happened as the ‘remaking of Aboriginal bodies into suitable subjects and workers for White Queensland’.

Among those forced to live this way were the mother and grandmother of Gail Beck, an indigenous activist in Perth who was once a nurse but now works at the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, fighting to reclaim land rights for her local community, the Noongar. When I visit her at her home in the picturesque port city of Fremantle, speaking to her as she cooks, awaiting a visit from the Aboriginal Australian side of her family, I find someone who has few ways to quantify the pain and loss.

Gail is sixty years old but her true family story is still fairly new to her. Until her thirties, she didn’t even know she had any indigenous ancestry. She had been raised to believe she was Italian – a lie to explain her olive skin, her mother terrified that if she were told the truth, Gail might be taken away by the authorities as she herself had been. So she lived under a conspiracy of silence, shielded from the fact that her grandmother had been one of the Stolen Generations, a ‘half-caste’ taken from her family to live in a Catholic missionary home in 1911 at the age of two. There, she had been abused, physically, mentally, sexually. ‘She was put out to service at thirteen. Didn’t get paid, nothing like that. And she stayed there until she was an adult.’ A similar fate befell Gail’s mother, who was under the supervisory care of the nuns in the home from the day she was born, beaten and burned by them when she grew older. The Sisters of Mercy ‘were very cruel people’, Gail recounts.

Learning about her family’s past, and having it confirmed by her grandmother’s papers, was a bolt from the blue. ‘I cried an ocean of tears.’ At once, Gail gained a new identity, one that she was desperate to understand and build a connection to. It took her six years to find the part of her family that had been hidden from her, and she has devoted herself to absorbing their culture ever since. She shows me her blankets and pictures, adorned with the prints for which Aboriginal Australian artists have lately become famous. She has tried to learn an indigenous language, but it has been a struggle. She lives like most white Australians, in a nice house in a nice suburb, her knowledge of her great-grandmother’s way of life, as it would have been, fragmentary.

‘We are constantly in mourning, and people don’t understand that,’ she tells me. ‘The young children that were lost, that doesn’t just affect the nuclear family, that affects the community.’ And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, that the way of life she might have had, the knowledge and language she could have been raised with, the relationship to the local environment, all of this was trodden beneath the boot of what considered itself to be a superior race. After the arrival of the Europeans, even the creation of art sharply declined. It took until 1976 for Aboriginal people even to be able to gain legal rights over their land. Throughout, the victims had no choice. ‘They weren’t allowed to practise their culture, they weren’t allowed to mix and they weren’t allowed to speak their language.’ Having been told they were inferior, that theirs was a life to be ashamed of, they adopted different ways of living – ways they were told were better.

‘It was a real shameful thing.’

*

I don’t cry easily. But in the car afterwards, I cry for Gail Beck. There is no scale of justice weighty enough to account for what happened. Not just for the abuse and the trauma, the children torn from their parents, the killings, but also for the lives that women and men like her didn’t have the chance to live.

In recent decades, as scholars have tried to piece together the past and make sense of what happened, as they share with ordinary Australians in the long process of assessing the damage and its impact, we can see an overarching story about the definition of human difference. It shows us how people have drawn boundaries around other groups of people, and how far inside us and how far back in time the disparities are thought to stretch. These are the parameters of what we now call race.

That same day I meet with Martin Porr, a German-born archaeologist who works at the University of Western Australia, his work focusing on human origins. He feels, as do many archaeologists nowadays, that his is a profession weighed down by the baggage of colonialism. When the first European encounters with Australians happened, when the rules were drawn for how they should be treated, science and archaeology began to be woven in. And they have remained interwoven ever since. For Porr, this tale begins with the Enlightenment, at the birth of Western science. The Enlightenment reinforced the idea of human unity, of an essential biological quality that elevated humans above all other creatures. We live with that concept to this day, seeing it as positive and inclusive, a fact to be celebrated. There was a caveat, however. As Porr cautions, this modern universal way of framing human origins was constructed at a time when the world was a very different place, with far less understanding of other cultures. When European thinkers set the standard for what they considered a modern human, many built it around their own experiences and what they happened to value at that time.

A number of Enlightenment thinkers, including influential German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, defined humanity without really having much of an idea how most of humanity lived or what it looked like. Those who lived in other lands, including the indigenous people of the New World and Australia, were often a mystery to them. ‘A universal understanding of human origins was actually created at the time by white men in Europe who only had indirect access to information about other people in the world through the lens of colonialism,’ explains Porr. So when they went out into the real world and encountered people who didn’t look like them, who lived in ways they didn’t choose to live, the first question they were forced to ask themselves was: Are they the same as us?

‘If you define humanity in some universal sense, then it’s very restrictive. And in the eighteenth century, that was totally Eurocentric. And of course, when you define it in that sense, then of course, so to speak, other people do not meet these standards,’ Porr continues. Because of the narrow way Europeans had set their parameters of what constituted a human being, placing themselves as the paradigm, people of other cultures were almost guaranteed not to fit. They didn’t necessarily share the same aesthetics, political systems or moral values, let alone food or habits. In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.

And here lay the fatal error at the birth of modern science, one that would persist for centuries, and arguably persists to this day. It is a science of human origins, as British anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, that ‘has written the essence of humanity in its own image, and that measures other people by how far they have come in living up to it’.

‘When you look at these giants of the eighteenth century, Kant and Hegel, they were terribly racist. They were unbelievably racist!’ says Porr. Kant stated in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764, ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’ When he met a quick-witted carpenter, the man was quickly dismissed with the observation that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.’ While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many, including French philosopher Voltaire and Scottish philosopher David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites.

By the nineteenth century, those who didn’t live like Europeans were thought to have not yet fully realised their potential as human beings. Even now, notes Porr, when scientists discuss human origins, he still catches them describing Homo sapiens in what sound like nineteenth-century European economic terms, as being ‘better’ and ‘faster’ than other human species. There’s an implicit assumption that higher productivity and more mastery over nature, the presence of settlements and cities, are the marks of human progress, even of evolution. The more we are superior to nature, the more we are superior as humans. It is a way of thinking that forces a ranking of people from closer to nature to more distant, from less developed to more, from worse to better. And history shows us that it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements are due to their innate capacities.

What Europeans saw as shortcomings in other populations in the early nineteenth century quickly became conflated with how they looked. Cultural scholars Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin explain how, in that century, race came to be everything. One writer at the time noted that the natives of Australia differ ‘from any other race of men in features, complexion, habits and language’. Their darker skin and different facial features became markers of their separateness, a sign of their permanent difference. Their perceived failure to cultivate the land, to domesticate animals and live in houses was taken as part and parcel of their appearance. And this had wider implications. Race, rather than history, could then be framed as the explanation for not only the Aboriginals’ failure, but the failure of all non-white races to live up to the European ideal that Europeans had themselves defined. An Aboriginal Australian – just by having darker skin – could now be lumped together with a West African, for instance, despite being continents apart, with entirely different cultures and histories. Both were black, and this was all that mattered.

Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity. It was an ideal that went so far as to become enshrined in Australian law. ‘When Australia federated in 1901, when the states came together as a nation, one of the first pieces of legislation to pass through Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the basis of the White Australia policy. It sought to fuse the new nation together with whiteness by excluding non-European migration and attempting to assimilate and, ultimately, to eliminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity,’ explains Billy Griffiths. What happened to Gail Beck’s family was one result of these attempts to remove the colour from Australia, in her case to drain it out of her mother’s line over generations. ‘There was this horrible language of “breeding out the colour” from full-bloods to half-castes to quarter-castes to octoroons,’ Griffiths adds. The goal was to steadily replace one ‘race’ with another.

By the time this state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing was taking place, a crisis had already emerged within scientific circles. Since the Enlightenment, many European thinkers had united around the idea that humankind was one, that we all shared the same common capacities, the same spark of humanity that made it possible for even those of us condemned as ‘miserable’ to improve, with enough encouragement. Even if there was a racial hierarchy, even if there were lesser humans and greater ones, we were all still human. But in the nineteenth century, as Europeans encountered more people in other parts of the world, as they began to see the variety that exists across our species, and failed to ‘improve’ people the way they wanted to, some began to seriously doubt this cherished belief.

The passage of the nineteenth century saw some make an intellectual shift away from the original Enlightenment view of a single humanity with shared origins. Scientists ventured to wonder whether we all really did belong to the same species.

This wasn’t just because of racism. Western scientists had been funnelled into a certain way of thinking about the world partly because of where they happened to be based. In the early days of archaeology, Europe was the reference point for subsequent research elsewhere. Before anyone was sure about humanity’s African origins, human fossils in Europe provided the first data. According to John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York, this created an indexing problem. ‘If you have a series of observations, the first observations guide you more so than the latter ones. And our first observations about human evolution were based on an archaeological record in Europe.’ The first movements out of Africa were eastwards, not westwards. This is why you see elephants in both Africa and Asia. Europe isn’t where humans originated – indeed, being so inhospitable back then, it was one of the last places they migrated to, long after going to Australia. But since Europe was where the first archaeologists happened to live and work, this geographical outpost became the model for thinking about the past.

Some of the very oldest human sites in Europe bear evidence of fairly sophisticated cave art. So as a result of indexing, early archaeologists digging on their doorstep logically assumed that art and the ability to think using symbols and images must be a mark of human modernity, one of the features that make us special. But the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe only around 45,000 years ago. When researchers then excavated far earlier sites in Africa, some as old as 200,000 years, they didn’t always find the same evidence of symbolic thought and representational art. ‘The archaeologists came up with a way to square this,’ says Shea. ‘They said, well, okay, you know these ancient Africans, Asians, they look morphologically modern but they aren’t behaviourally modern. They’re not quite right yet.’ They decided that although such people looked like modern humans, for some reason they didn’t act like them.

Rather than rethinking what it meant to be a modern human – perhaps taking out the requirement that Homo sapiens began making art immediately upon the emergence of our species – the rest of the world’s history became a puzzle to be solved. It’s a misstep that still has repercussions today. If art is what sets our species apart from Neanderthals and others, then at what point did we actually become our species? Was it 45,000 years ago when we see sophisticated cave art in Europe, or 100,000 years ago when, we now know, people used ochre for drawing? And if Neanderthals or other archaic humans turn out to show evidence of symbolic thought and to have made representational art, will we then have to call them modern too? ‘Behavioural modernity is a diagnosis,’ says Shea. All the archaeologists can think to do is ‘rummage around looking for other evidence that will confirm this diagnosis of modernity’.

In the nineteenth century, such uncertainty around what constituted a modern human being was taken a leap further. If people weren’t cultivating the land or living in brick houses, some asked, could they be considered modern? And if they weren’t modern, were they even the same species?

Australia in all its alien strangeness posed a particular challenge to European thinkers. Anderson and Perrin argue that the discovery of the continent helped shatter the Enlightenment belief in human unity. After all, here was a remote place, with its own animals not seen elsewhere, kangaroos and koalas, and with its own plants, flowers and unusual landscape. ‘Based on observations of the uniqueness of Australian flora and fauna’ there were ‘suspicions that the entire continent might have been the product of a separate creation,’ they write. The humans of Australia were thought to be as strange as everything else there.

After the remains subsequently labelled Neanderthal were first identified in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856, Martin Porr and his colleague Jacqueline Matthews have noted, one of the first things anybody did was compare them to indigenous Australians. Five years later, English biologist Thomas Huxley, a champion of the work of Charles Darwin, described the skulls of Australians as being ‘wonderfully near’ those of the ‘degraded type of the Neanderthal’. It was clear what they were insinuating. If any people on earth were going to have something in common with these now-extinct humans, European scientists assumed, it could only be the strange ones they called savages. Who else could it be but the people who were closest to nature, who had never fitted their definition of what a modern human was?

*

We are forever chasing our origins.

When we can’t find what we want in the present, we go back, and back further still, until there at the dawn of time, we imagine we’ve found it. In the gloomy mists of the past, having squeezed ourselves back into the womb of humanity, we take a good look. Here it is, we say with satisfaction. Here is the root of our difference.

Once upon a time, scientists were convinced that Aboriginal Australians were further down the evolutionary ladder than other humans, perhaps closer to Neanderthals. In 2010 it turned out that Europeans are actually likely to have the largest metaphorical drop of Neanderthal blood. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry have a very small but tangible presence of this now-extinct human in our lineage, up to 4 per cent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of humans as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans, too, mated with each other. In the deep past, it seems, they were pretty indiscriminate in their sexual partnerships.

‘We’re more complex than we initially thought,’ explains John Shea. ‘We initially thought there was either a lot of interbreeding or no interbreeding, and the truth is between those goalposts somewhere.’

The discovery had important consequences. It raked up a controversial, somewhat marginalised scientific theory that had been doing the rounds a few decades earlier. In April 1992 an article had been published in Scientific American magazine with the incendiary headline: ‘The Multiregional Evolution of Humans’. The authors were Alan Thorne, a celebrated Australian anthropologist, who died in 2012, and Milford Wolpoff, a cheery American anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, where he still works today. Their hypothesis suggested that there was something deeper to human difference, that perhaps we hadn’t come out of Africa as fully modern humans after all.

Although this notion had been mooted before, for Wolpoff, his ideas became cemented in the seventies. ‘I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked,’ he tells me. ‘And what I noticed was that in different regions, big regions – Europe, China, Australia, that is what I mean by regions, not small places – in different regions, it seemed to me there was a lot of similarity in fossils. They weren’t the same and they all were evolving.’

Wolpoff’s big realisation came in 1981 when he was working with a fossilised skull from Indonesia – one of Australia’s closest neighbours, not far from its north coast – which was dated at roughly a million years and possibly older. A million years is an order of magnitude older than modern humans, hundreds of thousands of years before some of our ancestors first began to migrate out of Africa. It couldn’t possibly be the ancestor of any living person. Yet Wolpoff says he was struck by the similarities he thought he could see between its facial structure and that of modern-day Australians. ‘I had reconstructed a fossil that looked so much like a native Australian to me I almost dropped it,’ he says. ‘I propped it up on my lap with the face staring at me … when I turned it over on its side to get a good look at it, I was really surprised.’

Teaming up with Alan Thorne, who had done related research and shared his interpretation of the past, they came up with the theory that Homo sapiens evolved not only in Africa, but that some of the earlier ancestors of our species spread out of Africa and then independently evolved into modern humans, before mixing and interbreeding with other human groups to create the one single species we recognise today. In their article for Scientific American, which helped catapult their multiregional hypothesis into the mainstream, they wrote, ‘some of the features that distinguish major human groups, such as Asians, Australian Aborigines and Europeans, evolved over a long period, roughly where these people are found today.’

They described these populations as ‘types’, judiciously steering clear of the word ‘race’. ‘A race in biology is a subspecies,’ Wolpoff clarifies when I ask him about it. ‘It’s a part of a species that lives in its own geographic area, that has its own anatomy, its own morphology, and can integrate with other subspecies at the boundaries … There are no subspecies any more. There may have been subspecies in the past – that’s something we argue about. But we do know there are no subspecies now.’

Many academics found Wolpoff and Thorne’s idea unconvincing or offensive, or both. According to historian Billy Griffiths, the multiregional way of thinking about our origins, undercutting the fundamental belief that we are all human and nothing else, has echoes of an earlier intellectual tradition that viewed ‘races’ as separate species. ‘Wherever we are in the world we look at the deep past and these immense spans of time through the lens of our present moment and our biases and what we want,’ he tells me. ‘Archaeology is a discipline that is saturated by colonialism, of course. It can’t entirely escape its colonial roots.’ Multiregionalism, while it was a response to the evidence available at the time, also carried echoes of the politics of colonialism and conquest. ‘That’s the ugly political legacy that dogs the multiregional hypothesis.’