A West Australian settler referred to local blacks who did not ‘know the restraint of being anything like the servant of another’.
- (Collie, Select Committee on Aborigines, BPP 7/538/1837/129)
On the other side of the continent William Thomas referred to Aborigines who had been brought up among the whites as ‘ones who have been taught to bow the knee’.
- (Thomas, 18 September 1841, ML MSS 214/8)
His colleague E.S. Parker argued that blacks on the Protectorate stations would not be fitted for employment as hired servants until they had been taught ‘to have some idea of the respective relations of the Master and Servant’.
- (Parker, Papers of the Port Phillip Protectorate, VPRO, Box 12)
The missionary James Gunther noted that amongst the blacks he was familiar with no man has an idea of serving another. This idea of their own dignity and importance is carried so far that they hesitate long before they apply the term Mr. to any European even when they know full well the distinction we make between master and servant.
- (Gunther, ML MSS B505)
The problem was that the blacks ‘did not understand exalted rank’, and consequently it was ‘difficult to get into a black fellow’s head that one man is higher than another’.
- (Bulmer, 1888:30)
SOURCE: “ABORIGINES AND EUROPEAN SOCIAL HIERARCHY” by Henry Reynolds, page 125 (pdf) https://bit.ly/3jNeu5i
IMAGE: Roebourne Prison c1910
See less
0 Comments