Father Frank Brennan SJ AO
This talk was prepared for the Celtic Club’s Breakfast on 14 March 2025 at Zinc at Federation Square.
Listen at https://soundcloud.com/frank-brennan-6/celtic-club
I acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the tribes of the Kulin nation.
The last time a clergyman addressed this number of people at breakfast in Melbourne would have been when Archbishop Mannix convened his famous communion breakfasts. Minister Williams will know how much things have changed. In those days, the men sat down to breakfast and the women were allowed to sit on the balcony listening to the learned words from His Grace. Thankfully things have moved on a little since then.
At my father’s funeral in June 2022, Patrick Dodson gave the acknowledgment of country after William Barton had welcomed the congregation on the didgeridoo. In her family tribute, my sister Madeline said:
Senator Dodson, our gratitude for your acknowledgment takes on a further personal dimension. Dad’s great grandmother, on the Brennan side, as a widowed mother with five children, migrated from Ireland in 1863 on the second of the imperial boats to arrive off the shores of Maryborough. It anchored off the coast, not knowing where to disembark. Two of the crew rowed to shore. They found two members of the Butchelor (Butchulla) nation who walked 40 km to Maryborough to raise the alert, whereupon a pilot boat was dispatched and, two days later, the David McIvor and her 414 passengers were brought to safety. We remain indebted for that early and critical welcome of our ancestral offshore arrival.
The ship on which our ancestors travelled was the David McIver. It had previously made five journeys bringing migrants from Liverpool to Sydney. This was the first time that the ship and its English crew had ventured north to Maryborough, in the colony of Queensland. The passengers disembarked at Maryborough on 9 July 1863. A week later, the Maryborough Chronicle published Captain Samuel Manley’s log of the voyage including:
(Monday) July 6th, at daylight, got under way to beat to the head of the Bay – at noon calm; towards sundown a fair wind springing up, ran for the head of the Bay, sounding all the time; ran with a light breeze until midnight, when came to anchor in 4 fathoms water; finding no communication from land with boat’s crew, pulled for the shore and landed on a sandy point; got two of the natives into the boat, and was directed by them to Captain Jeffreys’ Admiralty Survey Camp, whence communication was forwarded by a native to Maryborough; put back to ship and reached next morning (Tuesday) (July 7) at 10am after being in the boat all night;
Wednesday (July 8) received a pilot about 8am and immediately got under way and anchored at sundown about five miles from Fairway Buoy in the channel:
the next morning (Thursday) (July 9) again under way; about 11am the steamer ‘Queensland’ reached us, and towed us to the usual anchorage at the White Cliff; immediately began to embark the passengers and luggage in the ‘Queensland’; left the ship at 4pm and arrived at Maryborough at 7pm.[1]
I have long been struck by those words: ‘got two of the natives into the boat, and was directed by them to Captain Jeffreys’ Admiralty Survey Camp, whence communication was forwarded by a native to Maryborough’. What went on between these English crew members (who may never have met an Aboriginal person, and who definitely had never previously met any of the local Butchulla people) and the two Butchulla who then willingly directed them to Captain Jeffreys’ Admiralty Survey Camp? What motivation did the Butchulla person have to travel all the way into Maryborough to raise the alarm that the second ever migrant ship had arrived?
Of course, we will never know the answers.
But our curiosity is all the more heightened now that we have David Marr’s book Killing for Country: A Family Story. Marr tells us that along the Mary River, the Butchulla ‘were pilots on that difficult river. Steamer captains gave the Butchulla rations and fishing lines to guide their boats up the Mary and back to Wide Bay. Travellers arriving for the first time by sea were astonished by the sight.’[2]
Marr recounts the reminicences of a Maryborough resident published in 1907:
After we crossed the bar and coming into the river, scores of naked blacks swam to the schooner and boarded. They explained to the captain where the deepwater was, pointing the way the schooner would have to go. When we arrived at the wharf of the ‘Old Township’ there were more naked blacks, male and female, about the wharf, more so than whites. As soon as they commenced to discharge the cargo of the boat, which was principally flower, a train of blacks began carrying the 200 lb bags of flour to Mr H Palmer’s store and other places on their heads, and all in rotation. In fact, nearly all the discharging of vessels in those days was done by the naked blacks.[3]
So, there was a long history of Aboriginal labour, ingenuity and co-operation assisting the newcomers to their land – the Butchulla land which was to become the land of the new migrants.
Marr draws attention to an appalling sortie launched by Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh and his Native Police in Maryborough on Friday 3 February 1860, 3½ years before 2 Butchulla got into the boat facilitating the arrival of my ancestors. Bligh and his troopers led a raid into Maryborough with a view to dispersing all the Butchulla in the town. In the course of the melée, at least three Butchulla were killed. On the following Monday, a public meeting was convened at the courthouse. Mr E B Uhr was chosen to chair the meeting even though he had already commenced the inquest into the death of one of the Butchulla. 400 people attended the meeting and voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motion:
That this meeting, considering the present state of affairs, consider the conduct of Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh, lieutenant of the native police, is deserving of all praise, not only for his gallant conduct in pursuing the well known tribe of depredators, but for the manner in which he punished them, and therefore proposed that a committee, composed of Messrs Howard, Naughten, Faulkner, Southerden, and any other that may be appointed, shall collect subscriptions, limited to 5s., for the purpose of presenting Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh with a suitable and useful present.[4]
Only one person dissented, seeking to move an amendment. A second resolution was then put forward:
That this meeting, fully concurring with the resolution just passed, consider that some present acknowledgement is due, not only to Lieutenant Bligh, but to the men of the Native Police, and therefore propose that this address be signed and presented to the said Lieutenant Bligh, and that the committee before appointed shall procure signatures to the same, and present it to the said Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh.
One Mr Howard was anxious to second the resolution and to give an explanation. He told the crowd:
It had been remarked that the object of this meeting was to thank Lieutenant Bligh for merely doing his duty, but it was for no such purpose. It was for doing that duty under most peculiar circumstances, for doing it when there were several in the town whom he should designate croakers, that were watching and spying to try to find some speck on which they could form a complaint, and who were ever ready with lengthened faces to cry pity for the poor blacks.
The crowd cheered. Howard went on to remind the crowd: ‘They had applied time after time to the police for protection, which protection till now had never been given, and so determined had all become, that if the police had much longer neglected them, they would have taken the law into their own hand a la California. Lieutenant Bligh had made such a course unnecessary by his late step, which he hoped he would continue in, in spite of all the croakers could say or do, and he was sure the people of Maryborough would support him.’
In calling for a show of strength, Howard told the crowd that they must not let Lieutenant Bligh ‘appear ridiculous in the eyes of the blacks’. He said, ‘Now was the time for the people of Maryborough to make a bold stand, and say they would not have it, that they would no longer submit to such indignities.’ The leading citizens of the town pooled together and purchased a bejewelled sword for Mr Bligh.
One consolation is that 15 months later, another correspondent wrote at length to the Moreton Bay Courier recalling the fateful meeting saying: ‘It seems incredible, all this, and a lapse of 12 months since the hideous circumstance only makes it more incomprehensible to understand – more humiliating to ponder over. I never walk through Maryborough without blushing for that meeting.’…‘It is gratifying to find that many who attended that awful meeting – who subscribed to that weapon of blood, are thoroughly ashamed and repentant of the day, and the act.’[5]
This was the frontier which was home for the Butchulla who got into the boat three months later directing unknown English crewmen to Captain Jeffreys’ Admiralty Survey Camp, whence communication was forwarded by a Butchulla to Maryborough. This was the frontier which was to become home to my great great grandmother Annie who arrived with her five children. Annie’s husband Michael had sold their farm in Muckalee, Kilkenny in 1854, in preparation for migration to the United States. Sadly, when Annie was pregnant with her fifth child, Michael died and all plans to migrate had to be abandoned for 9 years. Annie did reapply to migrate to the United States, but the Civil War put an end to that.
How extraordinary that 129 years later, Annie’s great grandson Gerard would write the lead judgment in the Mabo case laying down the principles that the Butchulla maintained title to their lands unless and until the Crown lawfully extinguished those rights. On this St Patrick’s Day, we give thanks for the handful of croakers who dared to question the morality and even the utility of the wholesale dispossession and dispersion of the First Australians. And we give thanks to those on the other side of the frontier who for whatever reasons or mixed motivations got into the boat, directing the foreign newcomers to Captain Jeffreys’ Admiralty Survey Camp, then travelling to Maryborough to bring news of the fresh arrival.
In light of the defeat of the 2023 referendum, we need to be ever more attentive both to the croakers and those who are prepared to step into the boat. You will understand that I remain indebted to those two or three Butchulla for that early and critical welcome of our ancestral offshore arrival.
Just this week, the High Court of Australia has applied the principles in the Mabo judgment to the claim by the Gumatj clan in Arnhem Land against the Commonwealth of Australia. As with Mabo and Wik, there will be a lot of argy bargy about compensation and threats to people’s backyards, but at the end of the day, the judges were simply enunciating the principle of equality. In this week’s case, they said that even in the Northern Territory, citizens were entitled to the payment of just compensation if the Commonwealth interfered with their property rights. Why? Because the Constitution approved by our forbears at the end of the nineteenth century provides that the Commonwealth (unlike the States) can acquire property only on the payment of just compensation. Just compensation from the Commonwealth is a constitutional guarantee. Just compensation from the States is a matter for the discretion of the state parliaments. The great settlement in Mabo was posited on the proposition that native title survived the assertion of British sovereignty and that it could be extinguished only by legal action of the sovereign. Prior to 1975 when the Commonwealth Parliament passed the Racial Discrimination Act, the state as sovereign could abolish native title without payment of compensation whenever it vested title in other persons such as my great great grandmother and her relatives who established large orchards in and around Maryborough. Unlike the state governments, the Commonwealth once established as sovereign could not acquire any property (including native title) except on payment of just compensation.
In this week’s judgment, the High Court of Australia returned to ‘the fundamental consideration which impelled the formulation of the common law rule of recognition explained in Mabo’. Quoting Annie Brennan’s great grandson Gerard, they said that was ‘to bring the common law into conformity with “the values of justice and human rights (especially equality before the law) which are aspirations of the contemporary Australian legal system”.’[6]
Four of the judges of our present High Court went on to say:
As was stated in Mabo, to continue adherence to the common law’s enlarged notion of terra nullius (that the prior occupation of indigenous inhabitants of a colony could be ignored if those inhabitants were perceived to be ‘without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organization’) so that ‘the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land’ on the acquisition of sovereignty would have ‘destroy[ed] the equality of all Australian citizens before the law’ and perpetuated injustice based on an historical fiction. In the present case, to adopt the conditional common law rule of recognition of native title rights and interests would destroy that equality and perpetuate its own form of injustice.[7]
Rejecting the Commonwealth’s submissions, these four judges put the matter starkly: ‘Native title recognised at common law could, and could only, be extinguished ‘by a valid exercise of sovereign power inconsistent with the continued enjoyment … of native title’.’[8] The Commonwealth could only ever extinguish native title on payment of compensation.
Within a year of Annie’s great grandson Gerard and his judicial colleagues delivering the historic Mabo judgment, I was invited to address the senior partners of a large law firm at their annual retreat. At the end of my presentation, one the partners introduced himself with the surname Murphy and asked: ‘Where will this all end? Why not special rights for the Irish?’ I replied, ‘Being a Brennan and my mother an O’Hara, I have considerable sympathy for the Irish. I think the relevant comparison is with the Irish in Ireland, not the Irish in Australia. I, with Irish heritage and living on the other side of the planet, take some delight in the thought that there is somewhere on God’s earth where the Irish can be as Irish as they will – as selfishly or selflessly, as well or as badly as they might dare.’
The unanswered question is: what’s needed in 21st century Australia for the First Australians to be at home on their country?
It’s time to confront where there is not common ground in the Australian community. We still need to reach agreement on the issue of equality under the law. For example, most of those voters who voted ‘No’ in the 2023 referendum thought a constitutional Voice would divide the nation because the Constitution should treat everyone the same. Equality for the First Australians has three aspects. To what extent should we allow positive discrimination in favour of citizens who together with their ancestors have suffered acute injustice? To what extent should we make special provision for those who rightly claim an Indigenous heritage? To what extent should we recognise perpetual, collective rights rather than individual rights which might be supplemented by temporary special measures to address disadvantage?
Most Australians would accept in the wake of the Mabo decision that it is right and proper that special laws provide for the communal native title rights of the First Australians. The referendum result demonstrates that most Australians are yet to accept that there is a case for constitutionalising any collective Aboriginal entitlement, even the modest entitlement to have a Voice making representations on matters relating to them. Let’s remember that the First Australians don’t even rate a mention in our Constitution.
When President Michael D Higgins visited Australia in October 2017, he delivered an address on ‘Sharing the Tasks of Ethical Remembering – Ireland and Australia’ in which he spoke of ‘the importance of the construction one takes on of the first crucial encounters between those arriving and those who are receiving strangers. These early assumptions are crucial, built as they are on pre-conceived ideas. Is the Other a curiosity? Is the Other a threat? Is the Other a resource? How one interprets the behaviour that is offered by way of answer to such questions is inherently a moral choice.’ [9]
He suggested:
If we are to learn for the future, surely it seems that what is required is a necessary, radical hospitality of the Other which must be paralleled in the new circumstances by hospitality of discourse that is radical in its inclusiveness – a hospitality of narratives, courageous in restoring that which was elided, courageous in its offering of respect for complexity, above all courageous in defending the right of new futures impelled by the pursuit of moral worth.
On this St Patrick’s Day, let’s pledge ourselves to a renewed Romantic Australia where our commitment to equality of all Australian citizens before the law results in a moral reckoning with our past, an acknowledgment of our failure to ‘close the gap’, and a resolve to put right the social conditions which still result in our failure to reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration by at least 15% by 2031.
Just this week, the Productivity Commission has released the findings that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners are now 2,304 per 100,000 of the adult prison population – an increase of 400 per 100,000 since 2019, the baseline year for closing the gap.[10] In Western Australia, 6.73% of Indigenous men are in prison. As the Uluru Statement put it: ‘Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.’
Here at the Melbourne Celtic Club with its home in the Wild Geese Hotel, it’s fitting that we who are wanting to confirm our commitment to true equality for all, including our First Australians, recall W B Yeats’ poem September 1913 when he was lamenting the failure of his contemporary citizens to do what was needed to maintain a Romantic Ireland:
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
We need a few more wild geese proclaiming and labouring for freedom and equality in Romantic Australia. We need a lot more croakers prepared to call out the plight and injustices confronting our First Australians. We need to renew our thanks to those who first facilitated our arrival in this land like those Butchulla who facilitated the arrival of the David McIver carrying my ancestors to their new land. And we need to convince the next generation of voters and politicians that the First Australians should be recognised in our Constitution. Happy St Patrick’s Day. Thank you.
Frank Brennan is a Jesuit and Rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the PM Glynn Institute at Australian Catholic University, an Adjunct Professor at the Thomas More Law School at ACU and research professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. He is the author of several books, including No Small Change: The Road to Recognition for Indigenous Australia.
[1] Maryborough Chronicle, Thursday, 16 July 1863, p.2.
[2] David Marr, Killing for Country: A Family Story, Black Inc, 2023, p.166.
[3] George Dart, reported in Maryborough Chronicle, 4 June 1907, p.4, quoted by Marr at p. 166.
[4] Moreton Bay Courier, 21 February 1860, p.4.
[5] Moreton Bay Courier, 25 April 1861, p.2.
[6] Gageler CJ, Gleeson, Jagot, Beech-Jones JJ, Commonwealth v Yunupingu [2025] HCA 6, #79, quoting Brennan J in Mabo (No 2) v Queensland (1992) 175 CLR 1 at 30.
[7] Commonwealth v Yunupingu [2025] HCA 6, #80, quoting Brennan J in Mabo (No 2) v Queensland (1992) 175 CLR 1 at 36, 58.
[8] Commonwealth v Yunupingu [2025] HCA 6, #64, quoting Western Australia v The Commonwealth (Native Title Act Case) (1995) 183 CLR 373 at 439.
[9] https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/sharing-the-tasks-of-ethical-remembering-ireland-and-australia
[10] https://www.pc.gov.au/closing-the-gap-data/dashboard/se/outcome-area10
Tinteán 