David Day (1) (1949–)

Stops short of completely demolishing the heroic myth of Mawson, but not by much. Peter FitzSimon's characterisation of this work as 'incisive' is apt: Day makes use of previously unavailable primary materials - including Cecil Madigan's long-suppressed personal journals - to raise serious issues with Douglas Mawson's leadership, courage, fidelity, and scientific integrity. Not to mention his navigational skills. With Flaws in the ice the pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite show more direction, but this is a valuable addition to the Antarctic canon and will no doubt be expanded upon by future biographers of Mawson. show less

The Laws of Conquest

The history of humanity has always been one of people on the move, usually entering territories that were already occupied by others. This process is still ongoing in places like Australia, Indonesia, and Botswana. Unlike classical colonialism that had less to do with supplanting the existing population, it has grown even more profoundly influential on the original occupants.

According to this book the history of most societies can best be understood when they are seen as show more part of a never-ending struggle to make particular territories their own.

Whatever their geographic situation, societies have to guard against a weakening of their internal strength and viability, while also guarding against the territorial ambitions of their neighbours. It is only when such challenges arise that societies discover if the links they have developed to the land can be sustained or whether they will be conquered or perhaps have to look for new lands to occupy.

This process goes through three phases. First a de jure claim to the land, e.g. by raising a flag. It is followed by making the claim effective by de facto proprietorship over the territory by exploring its reaches, naming its (geographic) features, fortifying its borders, etc. Most important is peopling the invaded lands. The indigenous people must be absorbed, expelled, annihilated, or otherwise forced to acknowledge that they have been subjected. New stories and songs must be invented to invest the invaders with a deep sense of belonging to the land. This process is never-ending. The last and most elusive step is a claim of moral proprietorship of the land. It is a claim must even outweigh the claim of the previous inhabitants. Supplanting societies will commonly justify their invasion as bringing a higher order of civilisation, economic organisation or religion to hitherto more savage lands.

Columbus rose the Spanish flag and claimed every island after rowing on shore and establishing that his claim was not contradicted. Fearing the Portuguese and the Turks more than the natives he erected "a very large cross" in every harbour and on every suitable promontory. Columbus used notaries when staking his claims. Russia sent scientific expeditions to Siberia after a first batch of Cossacks, basically to a land already known. The Dutch rose their flag on Tasmania, and nailed boards to Mauritius (also in Spanish) and on the Atlantic coast of North America, although it impressed neither the English nor the Swedes. James Cook was happy discovering that New Zealand consisted of two island as it eased his claim for England vis-a-vis Tasman's a century earlier.

Maps were important proof of having been their first and good maps and descriptions were a first proof of obtaining the land. In the case of the Scramble of Africa, claiming your place on the map did not even require surveying it. Ethnic majorities could sustain the claim of a whole area. The claiming maps of India and Indonesia would later be used by the newly de-colonised states, often to the detriment of local minorities. Naming a place is another aspect of a strengthened your claim. Matthew Flinders named a continent Australia to incorporate the "old"names of New Holland and New South Wales, particularly when the French started surveying and naming. Even in those days good names like Virginia and New England also had marketing value to attract settlers and investors.

Castles play both a defensive and a signalling rule in the defense of newly conquered lands. Natural borders like mountain ranges work, artificial ones (think the wall developed by the Israelis and the Great Wall of China do not).

The assessment of the local inhabitants can be changed to meet new realities. Tasmanian aboriginals were first considered "noble savages", but when the British had decided to occupy the island that image was turned into "savages". Disposession is mostly driven by greed, but it is usually necessary to dress up thje dispossion in more respectable garb. Supplanters often juxtaposed their own rational city culture against the people populating forests and mountains. On a different scale that included the nazi-propaganda for the attacks on Poland and Russia.

Conquest can get animistic. At the end of the war Churchil urinated first on the Siegfried line fortifications and later in the River Rhine. Blood sacrifices create historical references that are used to create an identity as much in Australia (Gallipoli) as in Israel (Masada) or Serbia (1389 battle of Kosovo).

Constantinople was invested with Christian holy objects to make it a place worth fighting for and with the protective powers of those objects. When Mehmet II overcame these powers, he deliberately invested the place with his own Muslim objects of the prophet Muhamed. Still, when in the 17th century the British ambassador wanted to ship home some Christian objects, the people of Istanbul protested.

In the West monuments and ethnographic museums drew on the past grandeur of conquered empires. This was later changed into a mission civilitrice.

The process described in this book would be called signaling by evolutionary biologists. The human animal needs justification for his aggression towards others. The book concentrates on European and New World examples, but it could also be applied elsewhere, according to the author. He proofs that by using a few examples from Japan. I find this restriction somewhat pitiful, given the specific character of Western expansion (in the name of institutions like "king and fatherland", see When Asia was the World) and the importance of formal legal structures used in the European conquest. Equally, the book fails to describe why certain conquests are more successful than others. How come the Europeans could enforce their religion on South America and much of Africa and not on the Middle East and the Far East? What are the parameters for true cultural conquest, where occupied take over the culture of the conquerors? Maybe the author can answer such questions in another book. show less

How does a state acquire proprietorship over a territory, especially if there are people living there already? David Day makes the case that this has been the central political issue in Australia’s history, and it is a question that underlies many contemporary and historical national struggles, from the wars in Palestine and Bosnia to Aboriginal demands in Canada today.
Day’s history reveals many facts of Australian history that I was unaware of, starting with the fact that Europeans show more searched for it for centuries before Cook confirmed its existence as a continent in the 1770s. It seems astonishing that with sailing expeditions from the 1400s, and occasional contact, that it should take so long, but explorers rarely ventured far into the vast and dangerous southern seas. Having made the discovery, they saw little profit in establishing a remote sea port. The main interest of Europeans was to keep their rivals from benefitting, disregarding the fact that the land was already occupied. Hence the decision to deport convicts to establish a colonial presence.
But one small colony cannot establish a right of proprietorship over a continent. Day lays out the principles of ownership by discovery, conquest, occupancy or moral right, and says that Britain and Australia have gone through all of these in their claims to be lawful owners of the continent. Often these have come into conflict. The 200-year campaign to extend European occupancy, which still exists mainly in a few concentrated areas around the periphery, conflicts with Aboriginal ownership. Australian policies have denied Aboriginal moral rights by saying that Aboriginal people had no recognized property and were a degenerate, declining population anyway. Settlers reinforced this by driving them off their lands, often violently and sometimes through deliberate massacre as late as the middle of the twentieth century.
By portraying European and especially British cultures as superior, Britain and Australia attempted to justify the moral claim to ownership. To strengthen this claim, Australia tightly restricted immigration, particularly from Asian and southern European countries until the end of the second world war. This was critical to prevent nearby Asians from establishing an occupancy claim to parts of the continent where they had long had trading contacts and small settlements. Australia’s restrictive immigration policy, however, conflicted with the need to populate and occupy vast territories, so much of its foreign policy was designed to encourage British, northern European and white American immigration.
This overt racism broke down in the face of the need to expand population by the mid-twentieth century, when the shifting interests of both Britain and the USA turned away from the remote, expensive and unproductive colony that no longer fit geopolitical priorities. Needing to attract more foreign investment to support industrial development in a new economy, racial discrimination became harder to justify, and Australian policies shifted. A new economic boom after WWII was financed by growing Asian countries and their desirable markets, so Australia now identifies as an Asian country. In keeping with this more liberal approach is a growing acceptance of multiculturalism. Ironically, a new identification with Aboriginal history and peoples is now used to support a continued claim to proprietorship in the face of new interest by China, Japan and Indonesia. Conceding actual rights to land through a treaty with Aboriginal peoples has proven difficult, however, and a new White Australia movement is pushing the Conservative Party to anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal policies.
Day tells a history of Australia that is soundly researched and academically based, but interesting and readable. While the focus is on government policy and personalities, he fills it in with descriptions of the living conditions, women’s and workers’ movements, and with the story of Aboriginal resistance to colonialism. The book is well written and insightful, and leads to a more critical view of our own Canadian colonialism, where we have used similar themes in justifying the Franco-British presence and protecting it against territorial Americans. show less

This book is exactly like Antarctica itself: it's big, it's daunting, and requires commitment to finish from end to end. But it's also extremely well-written and never uninteresting. I agree with some of the other comments here that a map would have been helpful, but I found David Day to be a terrific writer and an extremely thorough researcher. My own family was part of the Sandefjord whaling industry operating out of Stewart Island in New Zealand, so I especially enjoyed the chapters show more involving the Norwegian efforts in Antarctic exploration (every time I read "Vestfold Hills" a smile came to my face).

5 stars. show less