A Review of Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement by Henry Reynolds, 288 pages, NewSouth Publishing (February 2021).

Truth-Telling aspires to tell the truth about the British colonisation of Australia. It poses two key questions: “What if the sovereignty of Australia’s First Nations was recognised by European international law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?” and “What if the audacious British annexation of a whole continent was not seen as acceptable at the time and the colonial office in Britain understood that ‘peaceful settlement’ was a fiction?”

Henry Reynolds opens with the strong claims about indigenous sovereignty expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, put forward by indigenous Australian leaders in 2017. Before the British arrived, it says, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders were “sovereign nations” and this sovereignty “has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.” Recognising this “ancient sovereignty” can “shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”

Reynolds argues that it was a mistake for the colonists not to make treaties with the indigenous peoples in Australia—as they did in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. In criticising this, Reynolds draws heavily on the writings of philosophers and jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment thinkers he names (e.g. Hugo Grotius, Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel, and Immanuel Kant) are often cited today. They were pioneers of the rights of indigenous peoples, international law, and “perpetual peace.”

However, in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour, the right of conquest was accepted by all nations as legitimate. Few governments were influenced by these Enlightenment intellectuals or their pioneering views on indigenous rights. One can argue that they should have been—but the unfortunate reality for the indigenous peoples of Australia is that they were not. Colonial narratives mostly referred to Australian aboriginals as “natives” who needed to be civilised and converted to Christianity. Occasionally, especially when violence broke out, they were described as “savages.” Early colonial writers did not refer to the indigenous as peoples with rights whose culture was perfectly valid the way it was. Instead they were seen as people who needed “protection” and “improvement.”

The sovereignty of Australia’s “First Nations” was not recognised in any treaty. As they had not developed clothing, archery, architecture, or agriculture, colonial governors judged real estate transactions, sovereignty, and diplomacy to be beyond them. Governors occasionally floated the idea of a treaty—but no tangible action was taken in that regard. It is not that the British did not know how to make treaties with native peoples. As Reynolds points out, they made plenty elsewhere. But in Australia, colonial officials saw no point in making treaties as they judged the natives unable to understand them and, in any case, it was not obvious who would have had the authority to sign them on behalf of the Aboriginals.

Legally, as far as Britain was concerned, Aboriginal sovereignty in the eastern half of Australia was extinguished by a proclamation made by Captain Arthur Phillip on 7 February 1788 by virtue of which he became first governor of the colony of New South Wales. In the western half of the country, Captain James Stirling established the Swan River Colony in 1829, renamed Western Australia in 1832.

Reynolds argues that it was an “audacious territorial appropriation,” invalid in international law, for a British king to claim sovereignty over a peopled continent in 1788, describing the “expropriation” of “half a continent” as “act of theft on a truly heroic scale.” However, such large annexations were not without precedent at the time. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the peopled New World between Spain and Portugal. It gave Africa to the Portuguese, North America to the Spanish, and unknowingly split South America between them, with Portugal getting what is now Brazil and Spain the rest. The treaty granted sovereignty to Portugal and Spain on condition that they “saved the souls” of the natives.

Protestant sovereigns ignored this Catholic treaty, but adopted the justification that conquest was legitimate if undertaken to “save souls.” The British colonised New England; the Dutch the lucrative Spice Islands (Indonesia). Even François I, the Catholic King of France, colonised New France (Quebec) in full and frank disregard of the Treaty of Tordesillas, saying: “The sun shines for me as it does for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share of the world.” All these colonisers built churches and made efforts to convert the natives.

Both Britain and France also colonised islands in the West Indies as did the Dutch and the Spanish. Britain, France, Holland, and Spain fought several wars against each other as a result of which the sovereignty of many lands and peoples changed hands. In this way, New Amsterdam became New York and New France became Quebec. Occasionally, sovereignty was transferred because of a wedding. Tangiers in Morocco and Bombay in India became British as part of the dowry of the Portuguese Princess, Catherine of Braganza, who married King Charles II in 1662. Tangiers was soon lost but Bombay remained British until 1947.

In practice, international law in colonial times was nothing like the ideal Reynolds argues it should have been. Conquest was routine and the right of nations to make war was accepted. The 1763 Treaty of Paris, for example, which marked the end of the Seven Years War, ratified the transfer of sovereignty over Quebec from France to Britain. The terms of this treaty legitimised this and other British conquests around the world as the price of peace.