Australia played a bloodthirsty role in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, 150,000 people from the South Pacific now live in Australia

From the time of white settlement, Sydney became the main port for the British looting and conquest of the South Pacific. British ships out of Sydney supplied guns to Maori chiefs in New Zealand and to many tribal chiefs throughout the Pacific, using their trade in guns to increase British political influence, and to thereby facilitate their looting of the area.

This activity was almost universally bloodthirsty. The notorious activities of Samuel Marsden, the Anglican minister, flogging magistrate and missionary gun-runner, and the later "blackbirding" of many thousands of Melanesians as semi-slave labourers to Queensland, are only the best-known examples of a whole system of conquest and exploitation.

A typical event was the incident in 1837 when, without warning, the men of Sapwauahfik Atoll (then called Ngatik) in Micronesia were killed by the crew of a trade ship, out of Sydney, who wished to steal a cache of valuable tortoiseshell possessed by the islanders. This is recounted in the fascinating book, The Ngatik Massacre (Smithsonian Institute, 1993) by Lin Poyer

The story of this community is, in its own way, just as fascinating a story as that of the Pitcairn Islanders. After the massacre, several of the European murderers settled on the island and were joined by a collection of other Pacific beachcombers, who cohabited with the female survivors of the massacre, giving rise to a vigorous new community with its own complex culture, which now numbers some hundreds, descended, in a way, from the murderers and the surviving widows of the murdered men. Needless to say, a collective memory of the massacre is an important part of the cultural history of the island.

Quite a lot of South Pacific history is like this, containing terrible memories of past atrocities mixed with the extraordinary resilience of the surviving indigenous people, recreating a life and culture for themselves from whatever is left to and available to them.

In the light of this bloodthirsty Australian participation in Pacific history, an interesting feature of the racial history of Australia is the presence, today, of vigorous communities of indigenous people from all over the Pacific. For a start, people from the Torres Strait Islands, who are mainly Melanesian with some Polynesian influences, have scattered all over northern Australia, from Darwin to Brisbane, and there are even communities in Sydney and Melbourne.

There are maybe 30,000 of these people. The descendents of the Melanesians (Kanaks) who managed to avoid deportation from Queensland between 1900 and 1910 have developed into a vigorous, self-confident community, nearly 20,000, mainly in Queensland centred on Mackay.

More recently, large communities of people from Polynesia have settled in Australia: Samoans, Tongans, Cook Islanders and others, and some Melanesians from Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There are now perhaps 40,000 people of this background from the Pacific in Australia. There are also about 60,000 Maoris from New Zealand and quite a scattering of descendants of Africans and West Indians, sent to Australia as convicts in the 19th century, or who came, like the black Americans at Eureka, during the gold rushes. (In an article in the Journal of Australian Studies No 16, Ian Duffield calculates that 1% of the convicts sent to Australia were African or West Indian blacks. This makes a total of almost 2,000 black convicts. In Watkin Tench's account of the early colony, there are nearly 20 mentions of different black convicts. In "Australian Race Relations 1788-1993" published in 1994, Andrew Markus records: "Sir Frank Villeneuve Smith, at various times attorney-general, premier and chief justice of Tasmania, and the first president of the Tasmanian Club, was of part-African descent".)

The complexity of the history of the infusion of people of colour into the Australian community is underlined by the nasty hullabaloo directed at the head of a well-known and successful Western Australian Aboriginal writer, Colin Johnston, and the noted academic, Bobbi Sykes, whose detractors claimed that they didn't have the right to classify themselves as Aboriginal because their coloured ancestor was actually from somewhere else, despite the fact that they had identified from childhood with the black community. If you take together all these people, plus the more than 350,000 people who now identify themselves as Aboriginal according to the census, you have a community in Australia of indigenous people of colour from Australia or the South Pacific, of more than 600,000 people.

The phenomenon that has taken demographers by surprise, and driven conservative racists to fury, is the explosive numerical expansion of the self-identified Aboroginal population at the past few censuses. At each census the number of Aboriginals has gone up far more rapidly than either natural increase or even intermarriage can account for. What has actually happened is that many Australians who have a family memory, often concealed for survival reasons, particularly in the rabidly racist 19th century, having rediscovered and come to terms with their Aboriginal ancestry, feel sufficiently at ease to acknowledge it to the census takers.

The racists, of course, ascribe this to the (very limited) financial advantages, available to people of Aboriginal ancestry, but the more obvious explanation is the same kind of thing that drives other people who engage in the now widespread, very human preoccupation with family history, to proudly proclaim the convict ancestry, which was once such a terrible stigma. Recently, Paddy McGuiness has put a new slant on these things, asserting that because a majority of Aboriginal people appear currently to marry non-Aboriginal people, the existence of Aboriginal identity is questionable and the rapid complete "assimilation" of Aboriginals is likely. This McGuiness slant is not very useful in making an accurate projection for the future.

The overwhelming majority of children of unions between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people tend to identify mainly with the Aboriginal part of their heritage, and even if they don't, are often forced to do so by the residual racism in Australian society. In real life there is no prospect at all of Aboriginal identity dying out because of intermarriage.

The stolen children

The stolen children is the issue that most sharply embodies the brutal history and the unacknowledged guilt of white racism in Australia. To assist in the process of the widely acclaimed "passing of the Aboriginals", the racist authorities in British Australia in the 19th century began a process of stealing Aboriginal children from their parents to turn them into a docile labour force for the emerging Australian capitalist society.

Over the past 150 years, nearly 50,000 Aboriginal or mixed race children were stolen from their parents in one way or another. The process of the descendants of this child stealing rediscovering their Aboriginality is a part of the explosion in Aboriginal numbers in the census. In addition to this, in the early years of settlement, and in fact all through the 19th century, other mixed-blood people disappeared into the underclass of white society, often into the Irish Catholic section of it, where they were more accepted and could partly avoid the rabid racism of the British ruling class in colonial Australia.

The extraordinary popularity among white Australians of Sally Morgan's wonderful bestseller, My Place (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987) about her experiences tracing her Aboriginality, clearly indicates that many people are beginning to come to terms with the sorry history of white Australia in these matters. Another very moving book on this topic is The Lost Children (Doubleday, 1989) edited by Coral Edwards and Peter Read, which is the life stories of 13 stolen children told by themselves.

The definitive overview of the whole question of the deliberate disruption of Aboriginal life involved in the stolen children policy, is the magisterial and comprehensive new book, Broken Circles. Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 by Anna Haebich (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).

Another feature of colonial Australia was the intermarriage with Aboriginals of some migrant groups that had few women among them. Quite a few Chinese married Aboriginals. In central Australia very many of the "Afghan" camel drivers (they were mostly actually from the north-west frontier of what is now Pakistan, but crude British shorthand classified them as Afghans) married Aboriginals, and there is a community in central Australia, which mainly forms part of the Aboriginal community, with Pakistani names, who are descendants of these unions.

The explosion of Aboriginal numbers in the recent censuses is obviously a coming together of the delayed results of all these past practices and events. The antagonistic response to it from some of the more backward and racist white Australians is obviously a product of a very bad conscience about Aboriginal relations in the past. For me, these matters have acquired a strong personal aspect in the last few years, because, as I describe elsewhere, an inquiry by one of my relatives into our family history has produced a hauntingly circumstantial, but difficult to document, inference of some probable remote Aboriginality, from an Aboriginal ancestor who may have deliberately disappeared into the more accepting Irish Catholic working class of the 19th century.