Australia and the Enlightenment

In the almost one hundred and thirty  years that passed between Abel Tasman’s voyages of 1642-44 and the arrival of Captain James Cook and his crew at Botany Bay in 1770, a new age of Western philosophical thought emerged that used scientific reason to challenge traditional concepts of monarchy and the place of the church in society. It was to have a significant effect on world history, influencing the creation of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France, as well as contributing to the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Challenging the traditional place of Europeans in the world, it was also the primary reason for the revival of exploration in the Southern seas and determined the way in which the men of the Endeavour and those who followed them were to act towards those they found in the great Terra Australis.

This behaviour was significantly different to that of earlier explorers such as Tasman, Jansz and Dampier. Their search for the lands in the south was undertaken at a time of great expansion for Europe’s imperial powers; Columbus had recently returned from the discovery of the New World in the Americas, and many of the islands of Africa and parts of East India were appearing on European maps for the first time. Driven by material profit and immortal fame, they aimed at the conquest of lands and their resources in the name of the king and the spread of Christianity in the name of God. They sought a different type of civilisation to that they found in the Great Southern Land; the stark contrast of the aboriginal way of life to their own, coupled with a land characterised by desert and unusable soil led Dutchman Willem Jansz to describe it as a place where nothing good could be done. It was a view popularised by Dampier half a century later and was the reason why no European set foot here again for over a century.

It was the arrival of Cook that was to mark a great change in opinion towards Terra Australis. Unlike his predecessors, Cook and his crew saw the aborigines as the natural inheritors of the land who had the same right to exist under God as any European, and as such killing them or taking their land without permission was morally wrong. Yet the aborigines’ disinterest in trade and material goods, as well as their seeming lack of the social and legal structures that Europeans saw as essential to maintaining civil order, meant that the crew of the Endeavour still saw themselves as superior. Cook describes the aborigines as ‘timorous and inoffensive’ and the land as ‘in a pure state of nature’, such as that of European society before the development of ‘civilisation,’ and despite the successes of the aborigines he describes their way of life as an ‘inequality of condition’ when compared to European civilisation. Although the realities of European ‘enlightened’ civilisation were often in stark contrast to those perceived by Europeans at the time, like those seeking to spread the beliefs of Christianity far and wide before them the explorers of the newly discovered continent saw it as their duty to spread European ‘civilisation’ across the globe.

 

Samuel Calvert’s impression of The Endeavour’s arrival in Australia, entitled ‘Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian continent on behalf of the British crown, AD 1770, under the name of New South Wales’. First published in the ‘Illustrated Sydney News‘, December 1865.  [Source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an7682920]

However, civilising the aborigines was not only a desire in itself, but also a means to expand the boundaries of the British empire. The policies of the period’s imperial powers also sought to use new Enlightenment understandings of trade and social progress in order to advance their own colonial ambitions. Through offering gifts such as the cloth given by Cook to the aborigines, Europeans sought to encourage a dependency on European trade and commercial exchange, the great mechanism of colonial control at the time. Either way, the introduction of the Enlightenment’s key idea, civilisation, into New South Wales would have a profound effect on the future of Australia and its people.