The Legacy of Slavery Part 1 - Henry Reynolds and his 'Hypocrisy of Slavery'

As we detailed in a previous blog-post, historian Professor Henry Reynolds appears to have adopted some of Bruce Pascoe’s ‘selective editing’ techniques.

In this blog-post, we will illustrate how we believe Henry Reynolds is also adopting the Pascoesque technique of ‘leaving out some of the facts’ so as to ‘slant the narrative’ in a particular, political way.

Historian and Dark Emu fan Professor Henry Reynolds

Average Australians interested in our history, like us at Dark Emu Exposed, are relying on professional historians, such as Professor Henry Reynolds, to educate us about the past. Although we understand each historian will have their own, preferred interpretations and narratives for the causes and consequences of historical events, we do at least expect them to accumulate, as far as possible, all the facts, report them correctly and to at least try to explain to us why they do not believe in any alternative, contrary explanations. And we certainly do not want them to leave out crucial bits and distort the facts, or selectively present the facts, to suit their own particular, personal political view.

A topic that we anticipate will become more confrontational over the coming years in the English-speaking world, is that of the legacy of slavery. Already, and not unsurprisingly, our very own Professor Bruce Pascoe has found a way to weave the fantasy notion of Australian slavery into some of his public pronouncements, such as,

‘Pascoe added that while Captain Cook was "enlightened" for his time, "that wasn't good enough to stop slavery" in colonies. "What happened under their administration was slavery and murder," he said’. - The Sydney Morning Herald, 20/6/2020

"Group of prisoners in neck chains, Wyndham, Western Australia", dated between 1898 and 1906. CREDIT:STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA

Professor Pascoe’s comments are, as usual, widely reported on the ABC, despite the fact that slavery, that is, chattel slavery, never existed in Colonial Australia, and we suspect that Professor Pascoe is ‘just making stuff up’ when he claims,

"When you capture people, and put chains around their necks, and make them walk 300 kilometres and then set them to work on cattle stations, what's that called?" Pascoe said. "That's what happened in Western Australia and in the [Northern] Territory and in Queensland." - The Sydney Morning Herald, 20/6/2020

Professor Pascoe hasn’t provided any references for his claim, which is made all the more ‘emotional’, rather than factual, when placed, as it was in the SMH article, next to a photograph of a group of neck-chained, Aboriginal prisoners in Wyndham gaol in about 1900 (Reference 1). This photgraph has nothing to do with slavery.

Although the photograph is confronting to our modern sensibilites, the Aboriginal men depicted were ordinary prisoners - convicts, not slaves. They were not bought and sold. After their sentences were served, they were released. Their children were not born into slavery. There were no slave markets in Wyndham. This was not chattel slavery.

It seems Bruce Pascoe and the ABC have forgotten that Australia was established as a penal colony, and convicts were still being sent to Western Australia up until 1868, a mere thirty years before this photograph was taken. The formal convict system involving prisoners in chains and work gangs would have only ended perhaps, some 20 years before this photograph was taken, so historically and temporally, it is not out of context.

Hence, at the time, many in the WA community, and indeed the Western Australian colonial government itself, would have regarded this chaining of prisoners as quite acceptable and legal (Reference 2).

Dylan Voller is hooded and strapped into a mechanical restraint chair in March 2015 for almost two hours”. - Source ABC

Punishment of a Brazilian slave 1838 -Source

This tendency to ‘judge the past with the attitudes and laws of today’ is what we are going to explore with historian Henry Reynolds below, but before we do, consider the photograph of 17 year old Dylan Voller in 2015, when he was a detainee at the Youth Detention Centre in Alice Springs.

What does Bruce Pascoe and the other ‘pearl-clutchers’ such as the historian Jane Lydon and the ABC think of this? They are very vocal in condemning our country for how Aboriginal prisoners were treated in 1900, but what do they have to say about, or more importantly, what are they actually doing about, how we treat our prisoners and youth detainees today?

The treatment of Dylan Voller looks uncomfortably like the accompanying image of the punishment meted out to Brazilian slaves in 1838.

Our understanding is that Voller’s treatment was completely legal in the NT at the time, although to paraphrase Victoria’s celebrity Assistant Police commissioner, Luke Cornelius, the “optics” look “terrible”.

So isn’t Professor Pascoe being hypocritical by living in a society that condons treatment such as that suffered by Dylan Voller? How can Professor Pascoe claim the moral high ground when attacking our ancestors way back in 1900 for their restraining of prisoners with neck-chains, which were legal at the time, but he fails to do anything about the use of confronting, modern day, legal prisoner restraints which are freely available for purchase (here and here) in his own contemporary society?

Can Professor Pascoe name one other society which is better than Australia in this regard and in which he would be willing to live?

There are about 12,000 Indigenous prisoners in Australia today. If we say, one-quarter of Australia’s Indigenous population of 800,000 would be capable of acting as part-time mentors to incarcerated Indigenous Australians like Dylan Voller, then that means there should be 16 Indigenous Australians available to mentor every wayward inmate like Dylan.

Instead of whinging about the ‘injustices’ of the past like Bruce Pascoe does, why doesn’t he, along with say Noel Pearson, launch an Indigenous Mentor Program to ‘Close the Gap’ on the ‘world’s most incarcerated people’?

Hypocrisy anyone?

Henry Reynolds and Slavery

As an example of where we believe Henry Reynolds is using the Pascoesque technique of not revealing his sources fully and selecting only those ‘facts’ that suit a particular narrative that he wants to push, consider the following example from his recent book, Truth-Telling - History Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement.

On page 138, in a section where he is attacking ordinary Australians for their enthusiastic commemoration of Australia Day, he writes,

‘And then there is the question of hypocrisy. Many nations find it difficult to avoid when they commemorate their past. One of the best known examples is the United States and the Declaration of Independence, with its famous assertion that all men are born equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of the fifty-six men who signed the document forty-six either were, or had been, slave owners. George Washington owned 300, Jefferson a mere 100. Australians have given little thought to their own comparable problem.“ - [our emphasis].

Reynolds’ reference to our “own comparable problem” is to do with the ‘hypocrisy’ as Reynolds describes it, of the supposed ‘land-theft’ when the British settled Australia. We will leave that discussion for another blog-post. What concerns us here is the term ‘hypocrisy’.

Henry Reynolds does us ordinary, tax-paying Australians a great disservice with this shallow analysis of the apparent contradictions or, as he puts it, the hypocrisy, by the slave-owning signatories to the American Declaration of Independence, which asserts that, ‘all men all men are born equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

In our view, as one of our senior ‘elder’ historians, Reynolds should rather rise to the occasion and explain to us the full facts on how this document was created and how history really works.

Reynolds should have told us that yes, slavery was legal within all the Thirteen American Colonies, the group of colonies of Great Britain on the Atlantic coast of North America who declared independence in 1776 and formed the United States of America. And yes, “of the fifty-six men who signed the document forty-six either were, or had been, slave owners.”

But then he should have explained to us that, had the anti-slavery advocates within the colonies only been willing to agree to support the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the basis that slavery was abolished before the signing of the document, then the whole movement would probably have splintered and failed, and the United Sates of America, as we now know it, would most probably not have come into existence.

For the sake of the United States of America and the ratification of the Declaration of Independence (and ultimately for the sake of those us who thank God that Australians are not now speaking Japanese) compromise had to be reached. The anti-slavers had to sign knowing that initially slavery was to exist in the new nation, despite the lofty ideals of The Declaration, and slave-owners had to sign knowing that its ‘equality of mankind’ ideals would mean that ultimately, slavery would come an end.

Indeed, some of the colonies, or new states, quickly started the process to abolish slavery, with Pennsylvania first in 1780 and half of the other states by the end of the Revolutionary War, or in the first decades of the new century (although this did not always mean that existing slaves were freed immediately). America progressed on its slow but steady path to the ultimate full abolition of slavery on December 6, 1865, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending the distinction between slave and free states. (Sources: Wikipedia & Wikipedia Gradual Emancipation)

To our mind, history is not just simply black and white. The decisions our ancestors had to make were not always an easy choice between good and evil that could be quickly decided during an afternoon’s discussion. All of life’s choices are a series of tradeoffs and compromises – some are just day-to-day choices of little, long term consequence; others are of monumental significance to mankind.

For Henry Reynolds to summarily condemn the signatories to the American Declaration of Independence as being merely hypocritical slave owners, who failed to appreciate the mental anguish that they would be loading onto the consciences of some future American generation when they came to commemorate their past is, as British author and commentator Douglas Murray (3) says, ‘not merely foolish and unfair, it's dangerous’.

One wonders if in fact, Murray is actually speaking about the Henry Reynolds’s of the world when, speaking of the ‘tear-down-the-statues’ movement, he tells us,

‘The presumption that we can stand in perfect judgment over the lives of historical figures is not merely foolish and unfair. It’s dangerous. Consider what the statue destroyers [history revisionists] are in effect saying. They are saying that people in history should have known what we know. That's tantamount to saying they should have known the future. This is of course absurd, Yet more and more people believe it. Why? Simple. It's what they're taught. It is the fault of an education system that long ago prioritised empathy over facts. That believes the ultimate point of history is not to learn lessons from it, but to judge it from the pre-ordained, left-wing conclusions about such ill-defined concepts as social justice, equity and tolerance, Apart from breeding ignorance, this kind of education invites the student, the child really, to be judge, jury and executioner over issues that they, and increasingly their teachers know little or nothing about because no one has bothered to teach them the nuance, complexity and context that is history. It also breeds arrogance - I know things these people did not know, therefore I am better than they were. They have nothing to teach me” - PragerU Youtube Here

Murray, in the attached Youtube, neatly encapsulates why Henry Reynolds fails us as his readers, and probably his students as well. Instead of lifting our spirits, hopes and ambitions with the stirring words, ‘all men are born equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, Henry deflates us with his cynical conclusion that all we can see in the Declaration of Independence is hypocrisy. Thank God our colonial Elders were able to rise to the occasion and borrow from the spirit of the Declaration when drafting our own excellent Constitution.

Murray also speaks of the ‘New Better History’ that must take the place of the old. This is evidenced in the form of the ‘1619 Project’ which is now sweeping the US. Substitute Dark Emu for the 1619 Project and welcome to Australia Mr Murray.

Reference 1 : We are working on a more detail blog-post regarding this photograph and Aboriginal prisoners in general

Reference 2 : Nevertheless, many people did find the neck-chaining of prisoners unnecessarily cruel and unacceptable and further Inquiries were commissioned until the practice was ended, we believe, in the 1930s. This will be the topic for a future blog-post.

Reference 3 : See the books and writings of British author and commentator Douglas Murray