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Settler behavioural thresholds in colonial Australia

Ray Gibbons (2015)

Abstract: Colonial settler normative behaviour embraced Aboriginal extermination. A group wavelike dynamic is proposed to account for and model this behaviour. The behaviour was further shaped by a juridical process as settler sovereignty moved from de facto to de jure.

For 19th century society, Governments had a huge amount of Aboriginal land to expropriate

and allocate piece by piece, and an economy to grow. Politics provided the discriminatory

land legislation and the armed muscle to enforce its implementation; economics provided the

revenue from land sales and encouraged the growth of a pastoral economy with accelerated

immigration. In this rapacious climate, it only required individualism or the frenzy for an

increasing army of individuals (including politicians) who were acting in a collective

behavioural pattern to become wealthy as quickly as possible, through the acquisition and

sale of land. The collective pattern drew on shared self-interest to create an emergent group

behaviour that saw Aboriginals as an impediment to economic progress. This collective

behaviour encouraged Aboriginals to be killed or removed according to a supposed law of

nature, where only the superior race can survive, all the while trumpeting from the mid-19th

century the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism. It was wrong-headed of course, and self-

serving, but it induced a group behavioural disorder that resulted in ethnic cleansing. That is,

settler society reached and passed an equilibrium or threshold point,1 which we might simply

denote as ‘us against them’, for which there was an inevitable outcome.

For settler society, this threshold point can be seen to exist at the point when certain

behaviours became normative, that is, shared by the majority of the population. This

normative or group behaviour resulted from political, economic, and social processes, all of

which converged around a rush for land. We have identified examples of such normative

behaviour as racism, mass killing, and unsustainable exploitation, all of which characterised

1 For example, see Granovetter, Threshold Models of Collective Behaviour, JSTOR: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 6 (May 1978): 1420-1443 http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall10/V22.0480-002/granovetter.78.pdf http://www.jstor.org/stable/2778111

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colonial society for a considerable period - from the 1788 invasion to the last major massacre

in 1928. These behaviours overlap indigenocide and now extend them into ecocide. The

group behaviours are expressed over time, and, like any wave (or wave like) dynamic, are

subject to peaks; but the effect can also be persistent, resulting in a trans-generational

characteristic.

Persistency correlates with process repeatability, where certain actionable process

components are repeatedly triggered by common event conditions, reinforcing the

behavioural wave dynamic. There is still lingering evidence of these destructive behaviours

in our society today, in particular racism, ongoing Aboriginal mistreatment and a peculiar

lack of concern for the environment. Our short-term economic interests tend to over-ride our

empathy and altruism.

Along with certain shared behaviours, the architectural dynamics of indigenocide are

also evident with ecocide As pastoralism spread across the continent, it displaced not only

the original human inhabitants, but other species as well. Settler society was bound as one,

like slaughtermen in an abattoir, all sharing a common purpose. There was little or no will

from Governments or settlers to change course. The economics of exploitation were too

compelling. Plants and animals could not speak out against the invasion. They still cannot.

Without political and economic motivation to effect some particular beneficial

change, if indeed the benefit can even be agreed upon, individuals can feel powerless unless

they act - or are able to act - in concert against social strictures that they must otherwise

passively accept, like the impulse of any autocratic state which seeks to impose its particular

ideology in some form of social engineering, or the impulse of a certain society which

coheres through shared values, where the strictures are welcomed as opportunities, like group

self-interest.

Collective behaviour The term collective behaviour was first introduced in 1921 by Robert Park and refers to the

social processes and events which emerge in a ‘spontaneous’ or emergent manner from

particular collocated human crowds. As originally defined, this ‘spontaneity’ did not reflect

existing social structure such as the system of laws, conventions, and institutions. However,

collective behaviours like racism do have a structural dependency on a society’s laws,

conventions and economic motivations and cannot be separated from them in any meaningful

way because of their mutual dependency.

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Therefore, I have extended the early and original meaning of collective or group

behaviour to include systemic and structural elements. I have also relaxed the constraint that

crowds must be physically collocated. The crowds we will meet here are societies where the

participating individuals can be geographically and temporally separate; the only thing

binding them are political structures, and their systems of commerce, laws and culture; the

ethos which emerges is what will be called collective behaviour. We will see this overall

societal behaviour on clear display, and repeatedly, in these first hand recollections of

Aboriginal dispossession.2

There are as many ways for a different characterful society to emerge as for siblings

and genetically identical twins to differ within a shared environment, the phenotype plasticity

being moulded by context. It is an epigenetic effect, shaped by the environment. Some

characteristics will inevitably dominate and persist, either individually or collectively. And

defining characteristics for some specified population can fall within a normal distribution,

from typical (however that is specifically described, usually as a stochastic density function),

to less so. Within typifying characteristics, the normative can in some cases be dysfunctional,

as it clearly was for 19th century Australia, if we define ‘dysfunctional’ as intentionally

causing harm to some other thing or party; unable to deal normally with other parties in a

manner that respects their integrity. British pastoral society, which for many years was little

better than a foraging economy, was intent on Aboriginal destruction for white economic

gain. It largely succeeded.

Aboriginal depopulation waves During the 19th century, the first wave of Aboriginal depopulation spread across the

continent, from settlement beachheads that provided loci for the pastoral expansion. By the

early twentieth century, the British occupation process had turned most of Australia into

property of one form or another. Raymond Evans estimates that, during the 1860’s, the

Queensland pastoral frontier was advancing at the rate of about 200 kms a year. If we

continue the wave analogy, it was a tsunami, a primary wave of Aboriginal dispossession that

Government was unwilling to control. Quite the contrary: it was Government policy. If

settler society did not exterminate Aboriginals by shooting, then introduced diseases such as

smallpox or venereal afflictions killed them off. Government did not inoculate Aboriginals

against white man’s diseases, nor were Aboriginals permitted to own land. Free enterprise

businesses run by Aboriginals were discouraged or, if they were successful, closed down. 2 FWAYAF: Recollections from a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier.

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As the primary wave completed its purpose, a secondary wave of subjugation took its

place from about the 1890s to the 1950s, which collected remnant Aboriginal populations

into reserves or detention centres, where Aboriginal lives were strictly controlled. If

Aboriginals were fortunate, they might find work on pastoral stations or as domestic servants,

but rarely saw their wages, which were kept in ‘trust’ and usually misappropriated by

complicit authorities.

We are now well into the third wave, where Aboriginals, particularly those in remote

communities, are among the most disadvantaged on Earth. It is a Lemkinian genocidal

process, as measured by Articles 2 ((b) and (c), where cultural and psychological destruction

continues, suicide rates are disproportunately high, domestic violence is systemic, alcohol

abuse is wide spread, and life expectancy is low, with third world diseases such as trachoma

and diabetes unacceptably prevalent, the rate of diabetic amputations in some communities

being so common as to resemble a war zone.

When Aboriginals were pushed aside by a general ’wave’ of British occupation, it was driven

by a frenzy for land that consumed settlers and Governments alike. Officialdom gave little

thought to the Aboriginals who were displaced by their policies, and even less effort was

expended on where they were to go. The political idea of incarcerating remnant groups within

a number of detention centres began to receive the common support of all Governments,

perhaps originating with Governor Arthur’s Wybalenna solution on Flinder’s Island in the

1830s, which successfully managed a process of controlled extermination.

Ethnic cleansing was inevitable in this particular British occupation process, because

it allowed the Aboriginals very few rights; Britain could simply remove Aboriginals from

their land, or kill or subjugate them, purely because of their race. The wave of dispossession

had political, economic and social dimensions. Politically, grants of land were first authorised

at the favour of the Governor, but from the 1820s, Britain replaced the system of grants with

land sales, and began to enact legislation to alienate what the Home Office unilaterally

assumed to be Crown land. The myth of terra nullius3 was born. Economically, Britain used

3 Terra nullius or ‘empty land’ is a myth in many ways. It has been a subject of recent fractured debate, where the term is assumed to be historically correct in Britain’s justification for invasive occupation, when Australia was claimed by Cook in the name of the Sovereign. However, its first popular reference seems to originate with Henry Reynolds, in his Law of the Land (1988). I have not been able to verify that this particular phrase was ever used by Britain in the 19th century or before. It does not appear in any of the official despatches documented in the voluminous Historical Records of Australia, nor any other historical British source that I can discover, in relation to the occupation of Australia. That is not to say that the term is not retrospectively apt in the convoluted legal sense identified by Blackstone in his influential Commentary on the Laws of England, although he did not use the latin term either. It just does not seem to have been specifically used by Britain in its

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the sale of land to underpin the revenue of the expanding colony and to fund accelerated

emigration from the ‘mother’ country. Settler society could not have spread across the

continent in a ‘land rush’ without such economic and political support. The ‘wave of

occupation’ is a metaphor, but it is apt. Like any wave, it had an architecture, and it is this

dynamical architecture which we will now examine.

Settler behavioural wave structure and dynamics Individual behaviour is the sum of innate and acquired characteristics. So is collective

behaviour. To the extent that behaviours are acquired, we can assign dynamic vectors

(dependent variables) of behaviour – political, social, economic – that can become more

equally potentiated (that is, allowed to more equally and strongly respond to an event or

related set of events) across a critical mass of individuals, given appropriate political

conditions. As Semelin notes, mass killing often has a political use, and can be politically

encouraged for some perceived benefit, usually political but sometimes economic,

occasionally social. All these key behavioural factors have a multi-variate co-dependency.

Through equivalent potentiation, the aggregated behavioural vectors resolve

themselves to become increasingly synchronous across a defined population, and the

emergent properties of the system develop a pattern like a normalising wave, a modality, with

shape and forward momentum.

Figure 1. Emergent dynamically behaviour of colonial society expressed through the mechanics of wave like propagation

resulting from process driven events initiated by Government policies.

Strictly speaking, the classical wave equation is a hyperbolic partial differential equation. It

typically concerns a time variable t, one or more spatial variables x1, x2, …, xn, and a

scalar function u = u (x1, x2, …, xn; t), whose values can model the displacement of a wave. unilateral and increasingly violent usurpation of the continent, which quickly drew Britain into Lemkinian genocide as we know it now, but then was simply called extirpation. Therefore, we can conclude that the term is confected in the context of Australia’s occupation.

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The wave equation for u is

where ∇2 is the (spatial) Laplacian and where c is a fixed constant, in our case, the

velocity of the propagated behavioural wave.

In Cartesian coordinates, the Laplacian is represented by the rate of change of position

for each dimensional element, as described by

We have simplified ∆⨍ to operate as a vector coordinate ƒ = (⨍x, ⨍y, ⨍z), where the

quantities are numerical coefficients, rather than second order multi-dimensional partial

differentials. We can also write ⨍= ⨍xi + ⨍yj + ⨍zk. In our example (see figure), this means

that the magnitude of |DV | is simplified as √ (DVx2 + DVy

2 + DVz2).. Therefore, if the

vectors are of equal value (equally potentiated), then |DV| = DVx√3 = 1.7 DVx. That is,

there is an aggregate multiplier effect. This is the limiting case, which defines the dynamical

envelope or amplitude of the behavioural wave front. Expressed in terms of the behavioural

wave vectors, |DV| = √(DV2political + DV2

economic + DV2social); it is a first order approximation

of the dynamical behavioural model.

This multi-dimensional system model of a behavioural wave is a potential theoretical

extension of the Gini index,4 which measures wealth inequality relative to different groups

within some bounded population. The multi-dimensional model would need to measure the

dynamical behavioural wave dimensional properties as probabilistic density functions within

the Laplacian, for which the statistical Gini coefficient partially represents one dimension,

DVeconomic.

4 There is an accepted measure of wealth inequality in any given society. It is the Gini coefficient, developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist, Corrado Gini, in a 1912 paper ‘Variability and Mutability’. The coefficient can have a value between 1 (maximum inequality) and zero (where everyone receives the same income). For Australia, the Treasury office reports that the Gini coefficient has been steadily rising over the last thirty years: from 0.28 (1982) to 0.32 (2011-12). In comparison, Sweden is about 0.23 and the United States about 0.45. http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2013/Economic-Roundup-Issue-2/Economic-Roundup/Income-inequality-in-Australia

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The behavioural wave tends to structure the associated society with collective and unique

attributes or a collective and normally distributed behavioural phenotype. It is the effect of

the environment on acquired societal behaviour, as triggered by the aggregate effect of

certain originating events, and in certain circumstances, the effect can be trans-generational

or epigenetically heritable.

Suppose Dynamic Vector 1 (DV1) is the aggregate economy, DV2 is the political

process (involving a system of laws and regulations), and DV3 is collective individuation (or

societal self-interest). The scale does not really matter in this thought experiment. If each

vector is fully potentiated, the statistically significant group behaviour or wave dynamic or

vector space can appear like a unique biometric, that identifies the emergent characteristics of

its present and future history. The behavioural vectors are co-variant, any one of which can

affect the others.

There are ready colloquial examples, such as: there was a wave of popular support

(or revulsion or sentiment or anger or some other quality) for (something); or the tide of

public opinion turned on (something); or the blacks are a sub species and must be removed in

the face of expanding civilisation, because they are an impediment to social and economic

progress; and so on. We respond to these aphorisms because they seem to reflect natural

systems, what we know of the world.

So how would we physically describe a dynamic behavioural wave? Above all, to be

persistent, it must have collectively shared (normative) and stable characteristics; therefore, it

should be equivalently potentiated across each dynamic vector. It is difficult for politicians to

achieve certain social or economic change without popular support. Social cohesion

demanded it. Such was the case for settler society and its wave of invasive occupation.

Wave dynamics of group behaviour - reprised Colonial society overwhelmingly shared a common purpose: the pursuit of landed wealth.

Politicians and pastoralists generally all agreed on what was required, following a time-old

procedure. The occupation process followed a repeatable pattern of actionable steps.

Government enacted legislation to legalise the resolve, with armed force not far behind. The

economy and prosperity depended on it. So did Britain. And subsidised immigration.

Aboriginal welfare was barely a factor.

The wave dynamics of group behaviour were determined from this mutually shared

objective. The purpose of settler society was to push Aboriginals aside as part of the natural

order, where the weak must give way to the strong. Or was this purpose more realistically

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expressed as economically driven ethnic cleansing, with settler society marching in ranks to

the rousing tunes of racism and self-interest, led by baton waving Governments?

Conversely, without racist land legislation hastily rushed into effect by squatter

dominated Governments, and without a racist criminal code and armed Government

enforcement, that is, if the determining behavioural vectors - DVpolitical , DVeconomic , and

DVsocial - had opposing or counter cyclic values (particularly DVpolitical),5 it would have been

more unlikely that the colonial land rush would have been so pronounced and prolonged; the

economic motive would have been much less, as would the drive for speculative self-

enrichment.

Suppose we assign a scale for DVpolitical in a range of 1 to 10, where 1 is least racist

(compassionate) and 10 is most racist (as ascribed by discriminatory legislation). Suppose we

develop similar scales for the other potentiating behavioural vectors, say a scale from

sustainable to exploitative for DVeconomic ; and altruistic (empathetic) to highly self interested

for DVsocial ; it is easy to how an overall behavioural dynamic can emerge for a defined group,

within a normal distribution. However, none of these index measurements yet exist. We still

have no objective method that allows us to pass a calibrated multi-dimensional scale across

any society or social group. For as long as we cannot measure, we must passively succumb to

‘larger unknown forces’, like invoking the ‘evil spirits’ or ‘noxious smells’ of yesterday to

explain disease.

Perhaps it helps us understand, but not condone, why colonial society was

normatively responsible for ethnic cleansing and actively participated in mass killing because

of the economic benefits, all enabled by overwhelmingly dysfunctional but normative

political resolve. It may also help explain why contemporaneous Aboriginal society remains

among the most disadvantaged on Earth, in terms of financial and physical health, which is

not a statistic of which Australia should be proud. It suggests that there is scope for much

better investigation and measurement of epigenetic effects that are moulded by environmental

factors that are still very poorly understood. Indeed, the psychological suffering still evident

in many Aboriginal communities has aspects of acquired collective trans-generational Post

Traumatic Stress Disorder.

5 In our example, counter cyclic political values correspond with political driven negative feedback constraints on the occupation process, such as limiting the spread of the pastoral frontier until the rights of Aboriginals were properly protected, and enforcing the law for all people, not just the whites. Most collective colonial behaviour was subject to positive feedback, where dysfunctional behaviour was amplified and normalised through Government policies exercised over a considerable period of more than a century.

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Tony Broe observes that long term neural plasticity seems to correlate with better

early education, and conversely, the disproportionately high Aboriginal Alzheimer dementia

statistics are probably related to poor cardiovascular health (for example, the pathogenesis of

free radical oxidative stress caused by prolonged poor nutrition, where hypoxia may be a

trigger) and under developed early brain function (caused by inadequate paediatric

educational stimulation), rather than the popular misconception of alcohol dependency,6

which is merely a risk factor in some future but as yet untasked longitudinal study that

focuses on relevant epidemiology in any sub-population.

Normative societal behavioural characteristics Societies can acquire normative behavioural characteristics, like a statistical identikit, which

are often politically induced, or are a response to some major societal stressor, but then

become self-defining in a mutually supportive dance of the key behavioural drivers; the

patterned dance of a particular society for as long as the originating triggers are sustained.

There is a set of societal characteristics, or aggregate phenotype, which determine a

collective behavioural profile or a cultural identity. The characteristics are subject to the

guiding evolutionary forces of the found environment and socio-political-economic drivers7

on a particular culture.

There are as many variant and persistent cultural possibilities as there are unique

species, but they all depend on niche construction, where societies adapt to - or modify - a

particular contextual landscape. The group characteristics are often heritable or acquired

through cultural learning and assimilation. A society can normatively be ordered and

mannered, respectful of authority, eager to obey, conformist; or fearful and distrusting,

callously indifferent to racial persecution, autocratic, militaristic; or nomadic, non-

exploitative, totemic, sustaining; or aspirational, motivated by money and materialism,

intolerant, unequal. The cultural boundary around group behaviours, or cultural identity, can

lead to competition, cooperation and sometimes collision with other cultures. Cultures can

show convergent evolution, if the formative conditions or found environments are similar.

6 Professor Tony Broe AM is a specialist in geriatric health, dementia and brain ageing. He is the Program Head of the Koori Growing Old Well Study in the Aboriginal Health & Ageing Research Program at NeuRA, Neuroscience Research Australia, an independent not for profit research institute based in Sydney. The majority of Broe's work now is on Aboriginal health and ageing. He was interviewed by Margaret Throsby on this subject on ABCFM Wednesday 11 March 2015. 7 The recent field of socionomics analyses the ‘wave’ principle of social behaviour, but does not yet have a strong mathematical foundation.

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The British clash with Aboriginal society was fundamentally political and economic,

although white social antipathy was not far behind, all driven by quite divergent and

culturally anchored concepts of property. For the Aboriginals, ‘things’ were to be shared; for

the British, ‘things’ were to be owned. The resulting cultural clash could only be resolved in a

contest of weaponry, too often the case, with inevitable winners and losers. Such a contest

usually precludes cultural absorption in the first instance: antagonism does not make for good

cultural friendship. Poor cultural acceptance and assimilation exacerbated the racial divide.

We can hypothesize that, for Australian 19th century colonial society, where at first

the Aboriginal population greatly exceeded that of the British, the wealth inequality or

income dispersion across the entire set of residents would have been extreme, which means

that the Gini coefficient would have been much greater than today. Of course, when Australia

was first occupied, the Aboriginal population were effectively non-people, so were excluded

from propery ownership and other indicators of relative wealth.

The Gini index is a statistical economic measure, which takes the wealth distribution

as a density function for a given population and ascribes a value between 0 and 1 (or

sometimes between 1 and 100). Therefore the Gini index measures one dimension –

economic - of a society’s behavioural identity, along a normal distribution. We can deduce

that the higher the Gini index, particularly when compared to other societies, the greater the

collective dysfunction. It follows that, for DVeconomic as measured by a Gini index in the 19th

century, societal dysfunction was also extreme. Finally, we know that wealth inequality tends

to fracture socio-political cohesion, because the behavioural dimensions of any society are

co-determinate.

Such detailed multi-dimensional modelling has not yet been carried out, but may be

an important contribution to measuring the overall ‘health index’ (not just wealth) of any

population group, and Australia in particular, both past and present. For now, we are tied to

inefficient indices like Gross Domestic Product, which takes no account of any indigenous or

environmental cost; or the slightly better Gini Index that measures relative wealth inequality;

or the democratic vote ‘index’, which can perpetuate certain overly divisive political

structures, driven by increasingly partisan ideologies that can cement in place any economic

dysfunctionality, the competition for wealth driving the accelerating divide between rich and

poor, the divide between free enterprise and social equality.

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In 1948, George Kennan, a US strategic planner and career diplomat, is widely misquoted as

writing about the need to maintain wealth disparity, in order to maintain the United States’

standard of living. This is the inaccurate quote used by John Pilger, but he is not alone:

We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In

this situation, our real job in the coming period... is to maintain this position of

disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality... we should cease

thinking about human roghts, the raising of living standards and democratisation.8

The misuse of the purported quote does not diminish its relevance to a

contemporaneous sentiment about the 1% doctrine, most recently articulated by Joseph

Stiglitz (winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for economics) and the magnificent research by

Thomas Picketty, that neoliberal and laissez-faire ideologies can only deepen wealth

inequality within and between countries.9 But the quote does remind us of the dangers of

textual excision and selective quoting, so favoured by many narrative histories.

The actual Kennan quote is instructive. Although it was expressed just after a

disastrous Second World War and during the uncertainties of the Cold War, it reveals that

some of the exclusionary economic thinking persists, as shown by the increasing wealth

difference between a small percentage of any given population and the rest. The probabilistic

wealth distribution for most societies is becoming more skewed, the collective behavioural

dysfunction within a smaller controlling group becoming further entrenched.

My main impression with regard to the position of this Government with regard to the

Far East is that we are greatly over-extended in our whole thinking about what we

can accomplish, and should try to accomplish, in that area. This applies,

unfortunately, to the people in our country as well as to the Government.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and

ideological force among the Asiatic peoples.

Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little

applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly

developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly

8 John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p. 98; quote is taken from FRUS 1948 Vol. 1. p.524. 9 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality; Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

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favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for

most of the people in Asia.

This being the case, we must be very careful when we speak of exercising

"leadership" in Asia. We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have

the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its

population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples

of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our

real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit

us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national

security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming;

and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national

objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of

altruism and world-benefaction.

For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the

Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead,

whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual

interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one.

The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even

made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the

relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some

solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. All of

the Asiatic peoples are faced with the necessity for evolving new forms of life to

conform to the impact of modern technology. This process of adaptation will also be

long and violent. It is not only possible, but probable, that in the course of this

process many peoples will fall, for varying periods, under the influence of Moscow,

whose ideology has a greater lure for such peoples, and probably greater reality,

than anything we could oppose to it. All this, too, is probably unavoidable; and we

could not hope to combat it without the diversion of a far greater portion of our

national effort than our people would ever willingly concede to such a purpose.

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a

number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far

East. We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the

repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves

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in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and

ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and -- for the Far East --

unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and

democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight

power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming

period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful

study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to

our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas

remain in hands which we can control or rely on. It is my own guess, on the basis of

such study as we have given the problem so far, that Japan and the Philippines will be

found to be the corner-stones of such a Pacific security system and if we can contrive

to retain effective control over these areas there can be no serious threat to our

security from the East within our time. Only when we have assured this first objective,

can we allow ourselves the luxury of going farther afield in our thinking and our

planning.

If these basic concepts are accepted, then our objectives for the immediate

coming period should be:

(a) to liquidate as rapidly as possible our unsound commitments in China and to

recover, vis-à-vis that country, a position of detachment and freedom of action;

(b) to devise policies with respect to Japan which assure the security of those islands

from communist penetration and domination as well as from Soviet military

attack, and which will permit the economic potential of that country to become

again an important force in the Far East, responsive to the interests of peace and

stability in the Pacific area; and

(c) to shape our relationship to the Philippines in such a way as to permit the

Philippine Government a continued independence in all internal affairs but to

preserve the archipelago as a bulwark of U.S. security in that area

Of these three objectives, the one relating to Japan is the one where there is the

greatest need for immediate attention on the part of our Government and the greatest

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possibility for immediate action. It should therefore be made the focal point of our

policy for the Far East in the coming period.10

Although Kennan wrote for a different time, the thrust of his comments could apply

equally well to Colonial Australian Governments, in their policies of Aboriginal exclusion

and intentionally imposed disadvantage through homelessness and extirpation for those who

had been dispossessed. It could also apply today, where the wealth and health inequality

between Aboriginals and mainstream society is extreme.

Equitability, fairness and sustainability in colonial Australia Unequal societies are social and political constructs; they are generally made not born, the

product of the environment more than genetics. Nevertheless, such societies can be self-

sustaining for a time, until they begin to fracture and erode through systemic weaknesses

caused by inequality. In Australia, over the last decade, the richest 1% now attracts over 20%

of all income gains.11 The disparity is increasing, but is defended by right wing neo-liberal

conservatives, who argue that free enterprise alone creates wealth, ignoring the rapid rise of

communist and state controlled China.

While trying to remain impartial, it is difficult to avoid other contemporary political

examples. Among them, Abbott’s attempts at social engineering in his 2014 budget would

have meant that income inequality increased. Trusts, negative gearing, generous

superannuation tax breaks, transfer pricing, no capital gains tax, and offshore accounts are

predictably untouched and an ideological conservative budget policy will contribute to more

class warfare. Support for renewable energy, scientific research, and carbon reduction

through emissions trading is either cut or removed, but consumer electricity prices are

trending up, although per capita energy consumption is going down! 12 Aboriginal

programme funding is drastically reduced. The poor will further subsidise the rich. It is an 10 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948 http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1948v05p1 11 In June 2014 a report on increasing wealth equality was released: Advance Australia Fair? What to do about growing inequality in Australia. It goes on to state that wages growth has been concentrated at the top end of income bands, and that the richest 10% have received almost 50% of the growth in incomes in the last decade. The report was produced by the Australian National University among others. 12 This may seem paradoxical, that with falling electricity demand, prices are increased, leading to more falling demand. It was a result of electricity industry deregulation. Electricity retail prices have roughly doubled since 2007, well before the GFC for that to be a factor. The reason is that some parts of the electricity supply chain are monopolies, whose prices are regulated to increase by fixing the maximum rate of return the businesses can earn on the capital they have invested. This means that these businesses are encouraged to ‘gold plate’ their investment, in the main poles and wires, with over capacity, and takes no account of falling demand in the regulated price. The regulated increases are then passed through the supply chain, leading to more falling demand, and so on.

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anti-scientific budget prepared by the scientifically ill informed, with little regard for

evidence-based policy. Social fairness is exposed, along with the dogma driven liberal right

wing politics of unregulated markets, an unshakable belief in private enterprise and relaxed

safety nets.

The problem of inequality compounds when the rate of return from capital is greater

than the percentage economic growth, which is happening in all developed economies

including Australia. Those on fixed incomes are left further behind. It seems to be the result

of a deregulated market that inequality increases, driven by the natural forces of free

enterprise. We are fortunate that, with Federation, the Constitution provided for a minimum

liveable wage (unlike America), a happy accident that many liberal politicians still regret.

What of 19th and 20th century settler society? As a normative group, we see from the

primary sources and witness accounts that it was unequal, avaricious, and murderous; it

sought individual wealth through exploitation; it was overwhelmingly racist; it used the

legislature to suit its own purposes. There was no minimum wage, there were no safety nets.

Aboriginal land was expropriated for the ‘Crown’. Enfranchisement was restricted to male

landowners or lessees. Aboriginal trespassers on their own land could be shot. Sexual

predation against Aboriginal women was condoned. Aboriginal wages could be stolen, along

with part Aboriginal children. Aboriginal witness testimony against the homicidal violence

was disallowed. Introduced disease in the Aboriginal population was an ‘Act of God’.

Aboriginals could be incarcerated or detained in the interests of public order. Aboriginal

extermination was ‘the law of the fittest’. Eugenics was Government policy in an attempt to

breed out the ‘Aboriginal trait’. This was the toxic soup that fomented collective behavioural

dysfunction. Catastrophic Aboriginal depopulaton was the result.

Aboriginal extermination as public policy Aboriginals were targeted for intentional destruction, imposed by settler and Government

alike. With the loss of their hunting grounds, they also lost their livelihood. 19th century

settler society in particular, driven by the pursuit of landed wealth, was (with few exceptions)

coldly immune to Aboriginal suffering. Aboriginals were persistently rationalised as sub-

human. And of course, so the reasoning went, it is okay to kill animals; therefore such

Aboriginal killing is not a crime.

But the rationalisation was wrong, and still is. Aboriginal extermination was murder.

Aboriginal labour was a form of slavery. Aboriginals on negligible or no income could not

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count on the return from their labour, or the wealth generated by their lands. Aboriginals

were simply forgotten by white society as irrelevant to social progress, unless their efforts

were exploited for minimal wages, or basic rations and modest shelter, in an extended period

of enslavement, although the term is rarely used now because of its provocative connotations.

Sexual predation was accepted as a further form of exploitation, where Aboriginal women

were mere commodities, to be used and cast aside, the mixed race children an embarrassment

but not a reproachment. Theft of white-looking children from their Aboriginal families

became the new political doctrine, in the guise of assimilation. Full-bloods were expected

(and encouraged) to die out, often while incarcerated or in detention.

Some Aboriginals tried to play by white rules, and established their own cooperative

businesses, an agricultural enterprise at Coranderrk in Victoria with the help of John Green,13

and a fishing cooperative at Bribie island with the help of Tom Petrie,14 and others

elsewhere, but they were too successful, and whites complained. The enterprises were closed

down by Government.15 The Aboriginal communities that depended on these enterprises

were dispersed.

Originating behaviour in Australian settler society You may ask ‘what causes the behavioural ‘wave’ (more correctly, a collective behavioural

pattern with wave-like properties) to arise in the first place?’ The answer is that there must be

some originating event or series of related events, as described by some directed process,

which can trigger and give shape to innate dispositions. The occupation process in Australia

is an example. We have seen that it comprises a set of determinable and actionable process

steps and began (or was triggered by) the intent to invade some particular area. As the armed

occupation of land took hold, it largely displaced the original inhabitants from the area. When

there was no more land to occupy in that area, secondary waves of occupation advanced from

the occupied frontier or leap frogged ( metastasized) to other locations to begin the

occupation process anew, and caused `a further wave of Aboriginal dispossession in those

13 The Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines promised that the profits from the Coranderrk hop plantation would make the Aboriginals self-sufficient, and the profits would be used to build a much needed hospital, among other improvements. But the Board diverted all the profit to the Government. The plantation operated between 1863 and the 1880s, before it was vindictively closed down. [First Australians, ed. Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton: 139 – 169]. 14 The fishing cooperative and Aboriginal reserve was established by the Douglas Ministry on Bribie Island in 1877, and immediately became successful, but was closed by the McIlwraith Government in 1879, a victim of its success and white resentment, and the Aboriginal community was dispersed. 15 The Bribie Island fishing cooperative was closed down by the McIlwraith Government in 1879; the reason: Aboriginals were selling their fish at Brisbane, at a time when they were not permitted to enter the city. But the real reason appears to be that other white fishermen objected to the competition, especially from ‘blacks’.

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secondary areas, spreading and ‘purifying’ as it progressed. In this way, the process of

occupation caused the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Aboriginals across the continent.

There was nothing random about it; nor was it a ‘mysterious’ act of God. The invasive

occupation process was in most cases both intentional and encouraged, with Government

largesse at first allowing large tracts of land to be granted to fortunate citizens. Later, as the

system of beneficent grants became unwieldy, it caused legislation for ‘Crown’ land to be

alienated for sale. If legislation and supply were lagging the demand for land, Governments

turned a ‘blind eye’ to squatting outside the ‘limits of occupation’ or beyond the limits of

harried Government surveyors. As prime grazing land became scarce within the settled areas,

more legislation was hurriedly being brought into play to allow the further sub division (or

portioning) of certain tracts, when closer settlement was being encouraged for agriculture and

other purposes; with the occupying process then being repeated for each invasion point. The

sale of land did not necessarily confer full title for the occupier, so further legislation was

enacted progressively through the 19th century to give increasing security of land tenure,

culminating with Torrens title in the 1850s. If there was ever any uncertainty about British

rights to stolen Aboriginal land, by this time in the mid 19th century the uncertainty was

finally erased. The doctrine of terra nullius found full force, not to be challenged until the

Mabo decision by the High Court in 1992. 16

To continue the classical wave function analogy, the velocity and amplitude (or

overall strength) of each displacing wave of occupation was in proportion to the perceived

socio-political-economic benefit for the invading settlers and pastoralists, with Government

providing the necessary legislative and policing support for their individual and collective

behaviour. The benefits were considerable, creating great wealth for some, and economic

growth for many.

There was a major constituency which was not considered by any Government in this

process of land hand-outs and beneficence. Aboriginals were excluded. For settler society,

Aboriginals did not effectively exist, and had no rights of ownership to property or anything

else of worth for that matter, unless they objected to their dispossession, when they became

‘civilian’ criminals, subject to punishment by legislature and imposed laws whose inhumanity

and lack of fairness they could not be expected to understand or reasonably accept.

16 Mabo and others v Queensland (No 2) (1992). The legal decision was made by the High Court on 3 June 1992.

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Figure 2. Feedback with positive reinforcement.

There is an important distinction with our ‘wave-like’ analogy. Although the

dynamical behavioural wave was triggered by an actionable component in the occupation

process, it also fed back into that process causing the process to be self-modifying, and the

output (or outcome) became amplified through positive reinforcement. An example will

suffice. With the occupation process, there began a land rush. As the supply of land in an area

started to run out, prospective settlers and pastoralists pressed their Government for the

release of more land, which was then legislated into effect. Or they pressed their Government

for greater punitive actions against Aboriginals, which led to accelerated extermination by all

parties. That is, the wave of occupation caused a positive feedback into the occupation

process, triggering more waves (or a continuing wave) of occupation. The process fed on

itself, until the entire continent became property in some form or other.

Another contemporary example of positive feedback is the ‘wave of popular

sentiment’ or resentment against boatpeople: During the 2013 Federal election, Tony Abbott

stirred up a dormant ‘wave’ of racist hysteria about the arrival of refugees on boats, which

fed back into further inflammatory political comments, eventually culminating in

discriminatory legislation against refugees, once Abbott had attained office.

The behavioural determinism and procedural inevitability of indigenocide is also

evident in ecocide, causing waves of species extinction and by a very similar process. First,

there is the primary invasive wave, which having occupied or swept an area, leaves few

means for the original species to survive. Occasionally there are pockets of habitat remaining,

but without corridors between habitats, they may be insufficient to sustain the lives of the

remnant species, which perish in a secondary wave of extinctions. When the rights of the

original inhabitants are ignored or suppressed by an invasive, powerful and determined

occupier, no matter what the affected race or species or ecosystem, dispossession is almost

certain. It is just a matter of time.

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Group behavioural implications for Australian society today Racist policies or a racist societal backlash can always override humanitarian concerns. We

have the example today with refugees. Success itself can be penalised, if it causes social

resentment by one section of society. When even low paid Aboriginal labour was no longer

required, as larger cattle stations became automated and domestic servitude became an

anachronism, it was then a small step for many Aboriginals to become further marginalised,

and then alienated in a slow death by unknowable grief, the grief we can all appreciate but

may struggle to accept. There is the grief of unbearable and overwhelming loss, the loss of

land, of culture, of identity, of purpose.

We can liken the affliction to a collective post-traumatic stress disorder caused by

past events, by the killing times, by being dispossessed, by living under repressive Acts, by

having families coldly broken apart and children stolen, by racial segregation, by targeted

policing and excessive gaoling. With such sustained mistreatment, resilience falters. The

result: petrol sniffing; suicide; drug and alcohol addiction; domestic violence; poor health;

purposelessness. In truth, for many Aboriginals, it is also reliving a collective and recurrent

nightmare, suffering a shared trauma that refuses to heal, like a cancerous lesion.

For our society as a whole, it is a deep shame that we have yet to acknowledge

properly. This is our legacy. It has shaped us as a nation. We are yet to emerge from that dark

stain on our character, from that collective shadow of intentional and patterned ethnic

violence that traumatised an entire race.

Conversely, societies that are more equal almost always do better, if only because the

needs of the majority are better met.17 We can choose to share the fruits of our different

individual abilities, or not. However, if we choose not to share, society usually falters and

fails over time. Structural inequality can unsettle and destabilise a society. As inequality rises,

so do societal stressors: crime, mental illness, educational failure, malnutrition, ill health,

systemic poverty, and social alienation. This is nowhere more evident than in imposed

Aboriginal disadvantage, where genetic differences pall in comparison to the economic

triumphalism of the dominant social demography. Empathy is more important than naked

competition, when survival of the biosphere is at stake. However, some level of selfishness

(or self-interest) is also required. It is always a matter of balance, and is something we have

yet to achieve. In Australia, we do not seem to have learned from the past. It places the

future of us all at risk, for as long as we each strive to achieve some small, personal, fleeting

17 Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level; Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century; Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality; Karl Marx, Capital.

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advantage at some other deferrable or displaceable cost, a zero sum game that we convince

ourselves is winnable, but for which time is - and will always be - the only judge.

We have seen that ecocide follows the same behavioural pattern and process as genocide

(Moses indiginocide, Lemkinian and Levenian genocide, Semelin mass killing et al). It is as

illogical to assert that ethnic cleansing is motivated by compassion as to claim that self-

interest will lead to empathy and a more equal and democratic society through a ‘trickle

down’ philosophy favoured by liberal neo-conservatives. People do not usually become rich

by giving money away.

Perhaps another societal alternative is for a sovereign wealth fund to be established,

that deposits a relatively modest amount, say $1 million, into the account of each new born,

to be used for education and housing for the life of the person, each amount attracting the

usual interest and any franked dividends. This is not so far different from the Nordic states,

which manage the wealth of North Sea oil and gas for the benefit of all. The Nordic model

promotes empathy and equality, not self-interest. It works. But we are as far from this as

allowing many children to grow like weeds, with opportunities determined by the lottery of

birth. In fact, natural resources should belong to all, and not the Gina’s and Twiggy’s.18 Such

a fund would have an initial value somewhat less than $30 trillion, growing at a compound

rate of between 5 and 10% a year. As Einstein once remarked, compounding is the magic

formula for wealth accumulation. The interest alone would cover the amount for the annual

birth outlay. It is out of reach for as long as self-interest motivates us and our society, which

may yet be overtaken by the consequences of unsustainable individual greed.

Such an egalitarian society is more akin to early Aboriginal than our own. For

Aboriginals, sharing was more valued than the personal accumulation of possessions and

property, and where land and culture were the trans-generational legacy for the millennia, a

precious inheritance with value beyond measure before the British took it away, the moiety

and polity erased with the landscape, theft and murder the endowment, Aboriginal society

trashed, the resultant Aboriginal depopulation extreme. Racism and genocide have become

our collective legacy. It will continue for as long as the smallest Aboriginal disadvantage

remains.

18 In this example, without wishing to be unfair to individuals, it should be noted that Gina Rinehart is a follower of the extreme right wing free enterprise economics of Ayn Rand, and makes enthusiastic use of 457 visas to bring in low paid workers, arguing that she cannot find the skills in Australia. Therefore, the argument that free enterprise generates employment opportunities may carry an important caveat, when employer economic self-interest is concerned.

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When a number of people are acting in self-interest, their individual behaviour converges on

a similar pattern, which is not necessarily the same as acting in the group’s interest, although

it does identify dominant group behaviour. Nor is the ‘flocking principle’ the same as

empathy. However, the result of the collective and normative self-interested behaviour is that

it may help protect the group through emergent common interest, although it will not always

protect parties outside the group, which remain open to predation. In our society, we applaud

exploitation if it leads to personal wealth, and inherited privilege admired. When we find

disadvantage, we walk quickly by, as though its nearness might infect us. But why? Are we

so challenged by other people’s misfortune? How should we react to the destruction of entire

ecosystems and the species within? Do we accept such destruction as an unavoidable part of

economic progress, should we choose to measure it?

Exploiting an ecosystem is an extreme form of subjugation. It follows the all too

familiar process: invasion, conquest, extermination, and repression. The damage to the

ecosystem, if it is determined at all, we discount to zero cost. Unfortunately, the environment

cannot speak or vote; nor could Aboriginals before that. There is a tendency in some people

to exploit an asymmetric power advantage – that is, to take advantage of someone’s

vulnerability for their own gain - and there are few protections available. After all, who can

speak for something or someone that has no rights in law, when law provides the only

vocabulary to express any defence? As civilians, Aboriginals could be punished for resisting

their occupation. As enemy combatants, they could be slaughtered. Without advocacy for

their rights, they had no rights. Indigenocide carried no cost, nor ecocide. Without real

disadvantage to the perpetrator, where was the social harm?

Ecocide is still not a crime, although there may be minor penalties issued by

Environmental Protection agencies. Regulations may or may not exist, but if there is no one

to enforce the regulations, or too few, then the effect is to have no regulations, which often

works to Government advantage and that of the transgressors.

The appearance of lawfulness is often more important in framing public opinion and

support than its actual practice. If ‘fracking’ damages an aquifer, including the Great Artesian

Basin, there is no contingent insurance fund (or one big enough) to pay for its remediation.

Moreover, companies can simply liquidate to avoid their obligations and then arise again as a

phoenix company. Our legal system allows it.

When a loophole of any kind presents itself, our rational economic self-interest

requires us to take advantage of the opportunity, and our society makes faint objection, with

off shore accounts and trust funds abounding. Just as dummy bidding was a favoured

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stratagem for land speculators in the 19th century, or Aboriginal wages could legally be made

to disappear into the pockets of intermediaries and Government fiduciary funds. Or

Aboriginals could be shot because the shooters ‘feared for their safety’, if an excuse was

required at all. Or land could be stripped bare and allowed to erode, before the pastoralist

moved his herd to the next pasture and water source. The opportunity costs were minimal, the

potential rewards considerable.

Politicians are fond of reframing contentious questions in terms that suit their argument, and

then providing an answer on narrow ideological grounds. It is the misdirection of the

conjurer’s trick, getting us to see what the magician wants us to see. Take ecocide. For

example, Abbott argues (wrongly) that Tasmanian forests are not ‘pristine’ because some of

the United Nations listed world heritage area has been partially logged in previous timber

getting operations; therefore, more commercial logging is justified: but the amount of logging

in the prescribed UN heritage listed area is actually less than 1%. We can imagine Abbott (or

perhaps some other politician) using a similar specious argument to rescind UN protection for

the Great Barrier Reef because some of it is being degraded by port developments at Abbot

Point19 or elsewhere. We now learn that Gladstone port development authorities admit (after

years of denial) that turbidity caused by dredging around Curtis Island20 has, in fact, caused

dugong and other fish lesions (with associated destruction of seagrass on which many forms

of sea life depend), and was not the result of flood water runoff from upstream agriculture as

previously claimed. The Government argument depended on the notion that ‘runoff’ was an

‘act of God’ and therefore not preventable. We would be shocked by a catalogue of disused

mine sites, vacant quarries, clear felled forests, and tailing dumps across Australia. Many of

them have restricted or prohibited access, to hide our shame. The tactic is that if it cannot be

seen, then arguably it does not exist. Perhaps we should have a pictorial encyclopaedia of our

continent wide vandalism.

There is not always a legal requirement to repair the land after it has been exploited. It

is a similar situation with Aboriginal society, which has been left broken and derelict across

remote areas, out of public sight, slowly deteriorating away, bereft and forgotten. It could

19 Abbot Point is the most northerly deepwater coal port of Australia, 25 kilometres north of Bowen in Queensland. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority announced in 2014 it will allow three million cubic metres of dredge waste from the Abbot Point port redevelopment to be dumped within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundaries, now listed as a World Heritage Area, because the impact would be negligible. 20 Curtis Island is the second largest island on the east coast of Queensland (after Fraser Island) and the largest island within the boundaries of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

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have been very different. It should be different. It must be different, if we are all to have a

sustainable future that respects the rights of other peoples and species. And time is against us.

It is unclear that we will ever want to change while we can still extract some momentary

advantage for ourselves. Our collective behaviour – political, social, economic - seems set on

a destructive course. Without proper accountability, it is our children who will suffer. And

Aboriginal society. And the Earth.