First Impressions: Reflections of our Old People

Author: Jeff Nelson

Treasury's story reflects the policies and decisions made by successive governments, public servants, NSW communities, entrepreneurs and dreamers all looking to build or create something better. The chapters are collections of historical records and contemporary events to show the breadth and depth of Treasury’s role in shaping the colony and the State.

As one of Australia’s oldest continuing government agencies, Treasury represents a lens on Australian history. Each chapter tells a story that gives a crisper appreciation of far-reaching impacts of decisions made. Some will range from tragedy to triumph, of the great Australian dream, of ignoring public opinion and doing it anyway. Other chapters will provide you with an opportunity to learn new things not widely known. For each chapter and the amazing stories they contain, we ask you: ‘How must this have looked to Aboriginal people from the time of colonisation through to today?’

This book is a celebration of triumph, leadership and learning including building suburbs, keeping the State solvent, funding one of the greatest icons in modern architectural history, and funding the government of the day to take over the provision of railways in the late 19th Century. There are also behind-the-scenes looks at the introduction of decimal currency and Ministers and Treasury staff withdrawing bag loads of cash from the banks and hiding it in Treasury vaults to avoid paying federal taxes.

It builds a unique vantage point of where and why we are as a people and quite possibly as a nation. The elements of ‘she’ll be right, mate’, the general distrust of government, the failure of the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum, and a fair go for the little bloke are windows into the soul of a person and the community which they belong to.

It is widely known that Sydney’s history is much older than 235 years. Aboriginal occupation of the area became more focused around 20,000 years ago after the last ice age, when Aboriginal people retreated approximately 20 kilometres from the east. Before that, it would have been part of a range of homelands for the occupying tribal hordes of the many peoples along the coast.

The biggest misfortune for Aboriginal people in what is now known as Sydney is that it was ground zero in facing the introduction of not just the colonisers, but virulent diseases from the First Fleet and the many subsequent transportations. Different foods, animals and farming practices were introduced from the opposite hemisphere and the ignorance of the completely different climes brought about environmental disaster.

There was no acknowledgment or understanding of how the parklands and fertile plains before them were the product of careful, intergenerational land management practices. The different high fat foods imposed onto a delicate geography, ecosystems and waterways – cows, sheep, horses and carp – turned clear waterways into brown, silted rivers. That created so many disputes and veiled excuses for colonisers to disperse/eradicate those that dined on a wayward beast or animal.

Australia was not a wilderness to be found and conquered. It was a place to behold of land management practices developed to maintain a unique array of lands, plants and animals. This is demonstrated by the many depictions and visual records of the landscapes by settler artists, some that are shown throughout this book. The landscape was developed not by chance but by policy, as described by Bill Gammage in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia.

Fences on the ground make fences in the mind. Many conflicts arose due to Aboriginal people seeing desecration of something that was seen as significant to each group or tribe. What needs to be understood is that in Aboriginal cultures everything in nature and geography has place and purpose, has a will and elements of significance to the creation stories of those peoples and the places they inhabited. The concept of leaving food, tools and other resources in one place by Aboriginals was seen by colonisers as things being left behind and lost and therefore ‘theirs for the taking’.

Furthermore, there is a lack of greater historical recording of the peoples and their ways of life. Colonists falsely dismissed Aboriginal people as nomadic savages with no ownership of land as they did not use fences and did not have a single government or religious or social systems, all from a colonisers mind and viewpoint. Colonisers had little to no understanding of how to effectively work and manage the lands and animals efficiently of a completely different climate, as demonstrated with the greatest extinction rates since colonisation. The many complex languages, dialects and lores were not understood, with minimal, if any being recorded. Those things were taught and understood by Aboriginal peoples for 65,000 years prior; our governance, books and records were the lived memories and creation stories given to them from the many creator beings passed to each next generation.

The effects of colonisers' dismissive and simplistic thinking have had severe and far-reaching impacts continuing today. The implementation of Native Police, a strategy used in other colonies (including India, South Africa and the West Indies) demonstrated the true intent of colonisers: to take all lands before them using local knowledges in delivering devastating dispersion/murderous tactics – a strategy so successfully used in other colonies. As for resistance by Aboriginal peoples, archives and records suggest that for each one white person's death caused by Aboriginal people, up to fifty Aboriginal deaths would result.

Resistance to the Colony/State and movements for social justice is a shared story. Australia’s most famous bushranger Ned Kelly publicly aired his grievances of the Victorian colony and its forces in the Jerilderie letter (1879). The grievances in the letter were similar for Aboriginal people coming face to face with a system that was imposed upon them. Worse for Aboriginal peoples, the scales of Lady Justice did not recognise Aboriginal people to bear witness or take oaths. A murder trial run by the NSW Judge Advocate in 1838 began the process of changing the law for Aboriginal people to give witness.

The Myall Creek Massacre murder trials, prosecuted by John Plunkett, generated a broader public reaction that still permeates today. The reaction is reflective of how many Australians still think of Aboriginal peoples: a population of peoples whose religious, artistic, scientific, agricultural, aquacultural practices can be dismissed because they didn’t fit the Darwinian thinking of civilized peoples in the colonisers' minds. That current science indicates a legacy of 65,000 years of habitation, land crafting and management can be simply erased so that the stains of this country’s colonial history can be forgotten or rendered irrelevant.

The myth of Australia being freely settled, and that the wealth of the lands and the products produced should only be shared by colonial settlers and their descendants and not with Traditional Aboriginal owners, remains.

But Aboriginal people remain and thrive despite the challenges. This includes the revitalisation of Aboriginal languages. Across NSW there are seven Aboriginal Language and Culture Nests, supported by the NSW Department of Education, whose work is to try to recreate those things forcibly removed from Aboriginal people’s everyday life, language, connection to place and religions. While they will not get to a place of full knowledge and understanding, they will help correct the hidden history of the colony and help leaders of tomorrow to know and understand our collective past. Today, Aboriginal procurement policies of all states and territories demonstrate the entrepreneurial thinking of Aboriginal people in contemporary society; those policies returned an estimated $14 billion since 2015.

In commemorating Treasury’s bicentenary, it is essential to recognise the disparity of fortunes linked with the exploitation of Aboriginal people, their lands and resources. We invite you to celebrate and explore the spirit, drive and determination of Aboriginal peoples, the Treasury, the colony and the State. Let us confront the uncomfortable truths of colonisation and its enduring repercussions and foster greater awareness and understanding of the complexities inherent in NSW and Australia’s narrative of self. Let us never fade our Old People’s hope of a better tomorrow.