No More Conspiracy Theories By Bob James
Fraternal societies have been crucial to the shaping of modern, ‘European’ Australia. [EA] For more than two centuries they maintained a massive, colourful and often outspoken public presence and influenced political, social and economic outcomes, big and small, across the continent. Collectively, they have been enormously popular – their wide-spread occurrence is easily shown – and their memberships have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Today, however, they are largely invisible despite physical evidence for their importance still being everywhere in plain sight. And they have been almost totally ignored by historians. Re-instating these societies to their rightful place in the EA narrative will fundamentally alter how Australians see themselves.
But further to a correction of the record there are benefits to be gained from knowing why they have been deliberately airbrushed from history. On opposing sides in the revolutionary wars between Britain, France and the United States, just as the convict fleets were being fitted out, the original ‘fraternals’ adapted to the demands of modernity by splitting functions and by creating ‘false histories’. These early examples of ‘fake news’, emphasising exploitation of the vulnerable for the good of entrenched interests, travelled wherever the British Empire sought to impose its will. They became the ‘accepted wisdom’ of the New World and have been taught in schools and universities ever since. This ‘wisdom’ continues to underpin thinking about and policy-making in the areas of industrial relations, welfare and gender relationships, minorities and immigration, and resource exploitation.
Before this imperial propaganda can be replaced once and for all its formation and transmission has to be understood. This manuscript brings the separated ‘fraternals’ back together and explains how centuries of mis-information have distorted and diminished their potential for community building. ‘Mateship’ is only a shadow of what might have been achieved.
INTRODUCTION
…we need historians
It seems the origins of European Australia [EA] are still being contested. We are being asked, again, to choose between differing versions of ‘our’ history, and, by default, of our future.
…in EA historians appear to be missing
Critically, this time the study of our history is at a low ebb and our historians appear demoralised.
There are certainly some of this fraternity who will assert that they remain major players in the ‘Humanities’, that non-indigenous Australians are learning the relevance of ‘ancient wisdom’ and that there is still time to restore mutual respect and co-operation. Their ‘evidence’ includes a list of ‘essential books’ for EAs to read on Australia Day 2025. Out of ten, it contains three that are by ‘old’ EAs. One, Russell Ward’s Australian Legend’ (1959) is dismissed with a laugh, a second by Keith Hancock, Australia (1930) and the third by Stuart Macintyre, ‘Winners and Losers’ (1985). The other seven are by indigenous scholars or emphasise pre-1788 conditions.
Such references are welcome. They will, however, continue to have no effect on EA public policy as they continue to miss the salient point.
Contributions by a variety of Federal politicians to Australia Day events in, 2025 exhibited the depth and strength of EA’s entrenched thinking, attitudes in place well before Hancock’s publication. Suggestions by professional scholars around the same events amounted to a belief that their analysis of ‘how we came to be where we are’ remains an adequate response.
A lack of indigenous views have never been the problem. The ‘ancient wisdom has been available to EA since at least 1788 and yet here we are. The question to be asked is why acceptance hasn’t happened already?
The answer is in the culture brought by the invaders and in the processes whereby their attitudes have been repeatedly endorsed many times since. The problem – a lack of acceptance of a need for change – has been apparent within the ranks of the teachers of history for some time. Yet a sense of self-congratulation is apparent in their most recent effusions: ‘We need a clear strategy to turn things around…the History discipline and its staff and students – needs urgent and sustained attention.’ [i] Their concerns appear to be primarily their own survival: ‘There are fewer and fewer positions in History, and there are fewer students. Cognate disciplines…can provide a few refuges for aspects of the discipline and its practitioners, but they are insufficient.’ (Crotty 2024)
Their spokespersons only vaguely perceive a need to redirect criticism inwards: ‘The biggest danger… is perhaps not even the loss of livelihoods. It may rather be the loss of conviction in history’s defining ability to discern the difference between power and truth.’ [ii]
…fundamentals
Although centuries overdue, professional self-scrutiny is critical, because so many issues, people and events have been left out or mis-represented in EA’s national narrative. Fundamental assumptions in need of review include:
- The Enlightenment
- The British Empire
- The Selling of EA
- Mateship and ‘the Fair Go’
Not acknowledged in ‘our’ national narrative:
- The Invasion
- The Military Occupation
Secret Societies and the Role of Conspiracies
- The Official Cover-ups
- The Regular Re-Writing of History
…global culture …
In the northern hemisphere, at least since James Blaut’s 1990’s critique of world history,[iii] professional historians and politically active social commentators have been debating ‘imperial history’, ‘post-colonial’ and ‘global/universal history’. In Britain, Caroline Elkins has coined the term “legalised lawlessness” to describe the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law only to viciously bend it to serve imperial ends.[iv] An Indian academic, now in Europe, Patel Mishra, observed in 2020 that: ‘…The moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision…’ [v]
In another place he wrote: ‘What I didn’t realise until I started to inhabit the knowledge eco-systems of London and New York is how evasions and suppressions had resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge about the West and the non-West alike.’ [vi] A US researcher, Gerald Horne claimed, also in 2020, that ‘the seeds of (an) apocalypse’ – by which he meant slavery, white supremacy and settler colonialism – had been planted in the 16th century and had ‘eventuated in what is euphemistically termed ‘modernity’.[vii]
The ‘Culture Wars’ have been agitating some people in EA for decades. I remember when Manning Clark was accused of being a Communist spy and ASIO thought he might be a plant for the Roman Catholic Church? [viii] Before that there was Russell Ward’s appointment to the University of New England. These were high points for the local profession making itself known.
A self-described conservative Tom Switzer last year (2024) wrote: ‘Australia ought to be in the world’s gaze for being a successful, affluent, confident country that serves as a model for democracies around the world, with a commitment to the rule of law and liberty. Instead, it has now become the habit this time every year for the world to focus upon us as a model of the divisiveness and bitterness caused by the pursuit of identity politics.’ [ix]
…invasion
Switzer explained that the latest ‘front’ in the local war is the effort by ‘woke activists’ to eliminate celebration of Australia Day on January 26 – the commemoration of the British First Fleet of convicts arriving in Sydney Cove in 1788. Opponents say this is no day for celebration because it marks the anniversary of the dispossession of indigenous Australians and the “invasion” of their land.
…definition…
He didn’t offer an alternative to ‘invasion’ for a sudden arrival of armed troopers with clear intent to take possession by force of land already occupied by others. Since this problem has been incubating since EA’s earliest days a return to ‘the crime scene’ is a tribute to the vigour of indigenous scholarship. But it can’t be allowed to remain there for that’s not when planning for ‘the crime’ began.
Details of ‘the landing’ can be easily checked and the argument ‘invasion-non-invasion’ quickly resolved, one way or the other. Except that, as on previous occasions, the dispute is about assumptions behind the arguments rather than what is written on the page. Switzer knows that the single word ‘invasion’ carries seriously explosive baggage but he avoided spelling that out, as his cohort in 2025 has done.
… EA’s taught history has been fake, not true history…
‘Australia’, ie EA, has long been promoted as an example of modernity in the public mind to attract settlers. One particular image was often used to teach us ‘our’ origins. A rendering of the 1788 European landing at Botany Bay, it’s been used on calendars, in schoolbooks and on TV. It’s fair to say that the assumptions behind it became how ‘we’ liked to be seen and that it became ‘the truth’ by default.
Impression of Botany Bay Landing 1788
It shows no aboriginals and no convicts. There are no women, there are no guns. There is nothing likely to cause disharmony among men. The weather is fine, the water is calm and blue – the whole scene is peaceful and happy.
Someone made a decision about what to put in and what to leave out. We know that convict transportation was not calm, and peaceful, it was brutal and dehumanising. Just how bad it was, was known at the time but that has been written out and it has never been taught in full.
Though some still deny it, we know the treatment of the aboriginals was brutal and dehumanising and deliberately intended to make their land available to the invaders. People at the time knew, but when they passed ‘we’ forgot because it was never taught, either.
What became the national narrative wasn’t history as it happened, it was created. The image of EA was more important than ‘the truth.’
…changing but slowly
The detail of what most Australians have taken away from the classroom – that European Australia [EA] was a pragmatic, hugely clever response to London’s dual needs to empty its jails and to find new business opportunities – has been picked at, but the basic story has not changed. As recently as 2011 and again in 2019 Alan Frost claimed that his Botany Bay and the First Fleet contained ‘the real story.’ He challenged his predecessors with a multitude of official documents previously unused or, he claimed, mis-interpreted: ‘(In) these studies, I am challenging the established historiography of Australia’s beginnings, which I believe to be both severely limited in its perspective and wrong in a number of its central conclusions.’ [i]
His argument is persuasive with regard to his main concerns, the making of ‘political and strategic decisions’, but falls well short of what is required. He does not enter the ‘invasion’ debate, barely mentions the convicts or the operatives overseeing them and remains well inside the mythic paradigm.
…not taking in overseas insights…
Neither Frost nor his predecessors have done justice to the pathological sweep of the marauding dynamic involved nor its insanely damaging consequences. Rather, they have lowered their gaze and treated EA as a unique and almost flawless product of a travel agents’ convention.
They appear to have no interest in colonialism as a global phenomenon or in how ‘the British’ seem to have been so good at it. They appear to have completely missed, or dismissed as irrelevant, the civil war being conducted by ‘the Empire’ on its own people, scars of which came with the invaders only to quickly disappear from public discourse.
‘Our’ wars remained overseas, it seems, civil conflict didn’t happen. The few accounts of frontier wars and the long-term effects of dispossession are only the beginning of necessary discussions. Conflicts based on gender, ethnicity, religion, ideology and generational rights and expectations remain to be incorporated into the national narrative.
The Jenny Hocking pursuit of The Palace Letters (Scribe, 2020) showed that a fear of offending our imperial masters remained strong in certain institutions. The 2024 collection on Brith colonialism, The Truth About Empire, has only one Australian among sixteen authors. It has taken a woman of Zambian descent to research and to publish in 2024 ‘the story of Australia’s black convicts [which]has been [previously] erased from our history.’ [ii]
The ‘British disease’ of secrecy is never mentioned nor its relation to Cabinet policy. Lies, conspiracies and flagrantly false propaganda were inevitable agenda items for the 18th century British State given that the decision-makers were engaged in a struggle for global domination. The intended hegemony was as much religious and psycho-social as it was materialist and barracks-based.
All these’ differences of opinion’ made us who we are but are rarely found singly, let alone in combination, in our classrooms, our media or our public institutions.
Most of us could point to countries we believe are teaching false history to their students. We accept without question, for example, that in Communist Chinese schools ‘history changed dramatically… as political alliances and ideologies shifted.’ According to one eyewitness born in Jiangsu in1949, ‘In kindergarten, (I) remember singing songs about Russia and the “unbreakable brotherhood” between the two communist superpowers, but by the 1960s, “Russian comrades” were “traitors” and their role in ousting Japanese forces from China in World War II disappeared from her history books. Likewise, while students were once taught “gratitude” towards the US atomic bombs that forced a Japanese surrender, (the) Cultural Revolution again “turned history upside down“. By 1966, Ms Chen said, everything Western was ‘denounced’, books were burned, people were beaten.
We find it much harder to accept that ‘our’ history has been manipulated. Stanford University professor Daniel Sneider has spent more than a decade researching, writing and teaching about the formation of historical memory, comparing the way countries form divergent narratives. It is a matter of routine for all of us that ‘the history lessons we learn in school are revised and rewritten over time.’
Previously-produced material lauding the mythical view is still circulating while generations of students continue to receive ‘the (mythical) truth’ and, presumably, to pass it on to their offspring. Professionals continue to produce work marketed as ‘fresh’ and ‘innovative’ but which retain the mythology as its back-story.
When Melbourne history teacher Hania Arif, 27, first arrived in Australia at the age of 12, no-one in her new class even knew what or where Pakistan was: “There was absolutely no mention of Indigenous Australians or First Nation people,” Ms Arif said. “Australia was only talked about as a post-colonial nation — that we only came into being after Captain Cook landed,” She came to Australia in 2009.
The past a state chooses to teach the next generation can be used to inspire patriotism, loyalty, feelings of racial or national superiority and racial hatred: ‘Textbooks communicate the spirit of their time and express the culture they are written in’. The context is all important but it is astonishing just how long EA’s ‘golden image’ and its attendant assumptions of superiority have been in place.
EA commentators in 2024 still prefer to talk of ‘the arrival of British settlers’ and to say that ‘the primary role of the British Army was to protect the colonies against external attack’. Resistance by the residents if mentioned at all, is still treated as futile, as unimportant and as ‘their’ problem anyway: ‘The reactions of the native Aboriginal inhabitants to the sudden arrival of British settlers in Australia were varied but were inevitably hostile when the settlers’ presence led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of the indigenous inhabitants’ lands.’ (Found at Museums, War Memorials, etc)
What if other truths have been kept from us? What if other people and happenings for some reason or other are still invisible to the people who write the books and decide which stories we can hear? What if everything you and I’ve been told about EA has been fake news, a mythical history which didn’t happen at all?
In the case of EA revision has to begin before 1788 since the war for EA’s past had already begun, that is, before EA did.
The then residents didn’t feature in the conversation when an American loyalist James Matra in 1783 wrote “A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales” proposing a colony composed of fellow self-exiled supporters of Britain, with labour supplied by Chinese and South Sea Islanders (but not convicts). Matra reasoned that the south land was suitable for plantations of sugar, cotton and tobacco. ‘New Zealand’ timber and hemp or flax could prove valuable commodities. The whole could form a base for Pacific trade; and a second home for displaced persons like him. At the suggestion of Secretary of State Lord Sydney, Matra amended his proposal to include convicts as settlers, conceding that this would benefit both ‘Economy to the Publick, & Humanity to the Individual’.
In his on-the-spot mythical history three decades after 1788, WC Wentworth continued to ignore the indigenes but at least did not blame them for getting shot. He followed Matra’s boosting of commercial potential and foreshadowed the denial of the importance of convict labour. He insisted that settlement had been made for philanthropic reasons – ‘The principal object which the government of this country had in view was undoubtedly the reformation of the thousands exiled to these distant shores. The punishment …was not the end itself, but the means which it employed to effect this humane and laudable purpose.’ [iii]
Enthusiasts for a ‘new world’ argued that with ‘American’ independence from the stultifying hand of ‘Old Europe’ and the French Revolution decimating tradition and custom, a secular, rational and democratic world appeared to be in the offing. The ‘Divine Right of Kings to Absolute Power’ was to be replaced with ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’.[iv] The earliest ‘Modernists’ argued that nations making up ‘the West’ were engaged in nurturing freedom and the rule of law with an eye to the benefit of all their citizens. The idea was presented as an optimistic belief in human capacity to learn, to improve morally and, through introspection and self-discipline, to solve universal problems. Peaceful resolution of conflict was to be a given.
The reality was quite different. The then decision-makers,
whatever their ethnicity, religious or political stripe were not about to give up what they regarded as theirs. Yet, EA historians continue to argue that transporting convicts to Botany Bay was an example of the Enlightenment in action. Suttor was one among many when he wrote in 1965: ‘In the century or so beginning 1776, European communities …were politically recast in the mould of Enlightenment thought.’ [v] Alan Atkinson wrote in 1999: ‘The eighteenth century – the Age of Enlightenment – was above all a period of invention…One (profoundly new experiment in public order) was Australia settled by Europeans…’ [vi] In 2022 he was still using ‘elevated prose’ to extol the romantic promise of the Enlightenment as it supposedly drove ‘technological progress, material prosperity, emotional sensibility and cultural refinement’. [vii]
Gascoigne’s 2005 thesis was that: ‘The thin elite who largely determined the direction of events (from 1788 to 1850) generally assumed that society’s problems could be solved by the exercise of reason and that…improvement would naturally follow…(Such) beliefs… still largely determine the agenda for politics in Australia.’ [viii] In 2018, attempts to ‘civilise’ indigenous Australians were still being described as built on ‘the general acceptance’ of the proposition that the Enlightenment ‘shepherded…modernity’ into an Australia thereafter obsessed with material progress.[ix] A co-believer, in 2019, remained convinced that ‘It was almost inevitable that those first European colonists would bring with them a firm belief in the autonomy of reason, the importance of progress and moral improvement, and the relationship between the two.’ [x] Wilkie even opined that ‘…no-one seriously doubts that European Australia emerged in the intellectual environment of the Enlightenment’. (Wilkie, p.30)
To fit such a mindset, the colonial decision-makers must have been enlightened, especially those on the front-line, and especially the man who was first governor. Brian Fletcher’s contribution to the Australian Dictionary of Biography [ADB] in 1966 on Arthur Phillip is illustrative. Phillip’s career as naval officer and as governor are treated by Fletcher in isolation from one another. There is the merest hint of the realities of colonization – ‘the capture of Havana’ – which was the point of both careers. His life is a meaningless blank without them.
Phillip’s reign at Botany Bay is treated positively by Fletcher throughout – his ‘sound grasp’ of detail, his ‘foresight’ and his ability to predict future difficulties – all intended to maintain the ‘feel-good’ complacency with which European Australians have always cloaked themselves. Phillip’s image as a benign father-figure is only slightly shaken when his contempt for his prisoners is revealed. It’s not moved at all by the judgmental statement that his savage reprisals against the invaded peoples were ‘forced’ upon him.
When re-published on-line in 2006, Fletcher’s conclusions still amounted to ‘the superiority of British civilization’ and Phillip having ‘the more advanced opinions of his age.’ Atkinson in 1999 applauded attitudes held by this early decision-maker: ‘I aim to show … Phillip’s greatness not only in his courage and his powers of leadership but also in his intellectual authority.’ [xi]
There is no evidence of any steps taken by Phillip to amend policies blighting the lives of all transportees – policies to do with grog, sex, religion, the natives, ingrained social norms or isolation. The consequences of the policies – for example, drunkenness, abandoned children, street crime, property disputes – and the neglect of reform were all foreseeable.
By way of contrast, a northern scholar Damien Tricoire in 2017 edited a collection of comparative essays devoted to ‘the question whether the Enlightenment provided the cultural and intellectual origins of modern colonialism’.[xii] With chapters about ‘the French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Habsburg empires’, it escaped a purely British focus. He listed the options all administrators would have had – treating indigenes as people to be materially improved as traders; as suppliers of slaves/cheap labour; as consumers of European goods; as recipients of Enlightenment ideals; as teachers about their world (customs, botany etc); or as loyal citizens of the metropole.
Rarely is there any sense that EA authors have scrutinized ‘the crime scene’ for evidence that might not fit the official narrative. The mind-sets of Cabinet officials in the 1780s, fundamental to subsequent EA history, have not been seriously scrutinised by EA historians, as a group nor as individuals. Nowhere is there any understanding of the monumental conceit of northern politicians such as Banks or Pitt, assuming that it was OK, even a good idea, to choose a spot on the map, transport there a goodly crowd of ‘their people’ and say: ‘Treat this place as your own.’
As for those being moved, the chained transportees have been discussed only as ‘masses’ of people, rather than as identifiable individuals. They were labelled by one EA scholar as ‘inhuman wretches’ (Ellis, 1978), by another as ‘a deformed stratification …vomited up by a maelstrom‘ (McQueen 1968) and as ‘a lumpen proletariat’ (Hughes 1988) among other theory-based, research-free interpretations. Bongiorno, in 2022, saw only an undiversified mass of ‘convict labour’ pushed and pulled about by military officers until they became ‘thoroughly (and perhaps uniquely) modern’, which is to say ‘thoroughly documented and closely observed’. [xiii]
Being closely observed is down to the management expertise of the decision-makers, I guess, but they were not ‘good bureaucrats’ who use information gathering and analysis as a means to solve problems. What EA’s first ‘authorities’ were doing was collecting information to better prepare their security and defences. They weren’t interested in understanding any of the opposition, only in locating them and suppressing them.
Hereward Senior’s valuable PhD (1957) on the Irish rebellion of the 1790’s and the Loyal Orange Institute [LOI] has in its introduction: ‘…(With one exception) this topic has been untouched by historians.’ [xiv] EA scholars will be startled to read here of the importance of secret fraternal societies in EA’s origin story – the United Irish Brotherhood, Freemasons, the Loyal Orange Institute, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, among others. O’Donnell complained in 1996 of ‘(the) inability of (EA) historians to explain rebel militancy in exile and to appreciate the formidable diversity of the United Irish movement (a failing which) has characterised most treatments of the Irish political prisoners’ [xv]
When the ‘Botany Bay Project’ began in earnest with armed troopers shepherding chained convicts up the beach to build a jail and announce the beginning of decades of occupation by British regiments, fraternal societies were beginning parallel invasions of the new territory. When they joined the charade of modernism, however, ‘fraternals’ were forced to forget their heritage and present themselves as benign, stand-alone entities. An important force in EA’s establishment this early manipulation of the factual record should never have been missed
The imposition of separate identities on these societies has been adopted by EA historians without question, for example, Geoffrey Blainey’s conspiracy-free examination of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.[xvi] In 2005, David Fitzpatrick was a partial exception when claiming: ‘The idea of fraternity, and how to organise it, was one of nineteenth-century Europe’s invisible exports to the New World’. [xvii] He thereupon, confined himself to a similarly attenuated version of the Loyal Orange Institute [LOI].
The value of studying the related conspiracies among slaves has been recognised in the Americas.[xviii] Given the slavery context included, to Christian eyes, ’weird’ fraternities based on alternative spirit worlds, scholars might have conjured up similarly unfounded accounts as those about ghosts and poltergeists. But some at least have treated them like any other crime-scene, contesting, for example, the official descriptions of plots, even whether they existed at all. Administrations have been found using negative reports of slave activities to justify their policies publicly and to disguise their actual policies. The uses of secrecy on both sides of colonialism became a testing device for some researchers, a kind of barometer to show political temperature within slave settlements
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All Text by Bob James of Newcastle, NSW.
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