M2 - Learner Manual

3. Draft Instructions for Governor Phillip, 25 April 1787

Britain included the following instruction to Phillip, concerning the treatment of Aboriginal people. There is evidence that Phillip initially attempted to comply, although sometimes he had to resort with kidnapping ‘to conciliate their affections’. It is certain that land grants and military operations were far from conciliation. The particular instruction, which Britain repeated to other incoming Governors for their tour of duty, can be seen as empty rhetoric, mere window dressing for forcible occupation, where all land belonged to the Crown:

'You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them an unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence'. 

The draft instructions make no mention or acknowledgment of Aboriginal prior possession, and allowed Phillip’s right to make grants of ‘Crown’ land to whomever he chose, notably excluding the Aboriginal people whose land it was. Thus, Britain’s intent was clear from the first day of the invasion, that Aboriginal people had no rights to their homelands. Perhaps the thought was that Britain could assimilate Aboriginal people into British ‘civilisation’ through ‘conciliation’. The violent racial consequences over the next one hundred and fifty years were therefore inevitable. An obdurate Britain would not resile from its Imperial imperative to invade and control, not in Australia, not anywhere. We live with the outcome of those flawed policies today, where Aboriginal people generally remain marginalised, discriminated against in the Australian Constitution, and the denial of genocide continues as a political and public mantra.

Source: Gibbons, Ray. The Political Uses of Australian Genocide - the Role of Captain Arthur Phillip Reprised (Oct 2015)