Carl Feilberg was born in Denmark in 1844 and died in 1887 in Australia, where he had made a career as a journalist and newspaper editor. One-fifth of his production of articles and editorials focused on the issue which 150 years later - in the modern Australian society - seems to have reached a deadlock, namely the relationship between the nation's indigenous population and the millions of Europeans who now populate the country.
This week, a report was published by Reconciliation Australia. Nine in ten Australians agree that injustices occurred as a result of European settlement. Yet only half agree that the past race-based policies have created today's disadvantage. "This tells us that we have some way to go before our nation fully understands and accepts the wrongs of the past and what these mean to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today," director of Reconciliation Australia, Justin Mohamed, told SBS News.
In the audio interview above, the Danish historian Robert Ørsted-Jensen, who resides in Brisbane where he works at Queensland University, tells Carl Feilberg's story (in Danish language, see translation below), and he explains why he finds the story of Feilberg particularly inspiring because of its reconciliation aspects. According to the Danish historian, reconciliation is not going to happen until there is a new focus on and honesty around those atrocities and that genocide Feilberg was reporting on.
If you are interested to know more about Carl Feilberg, then look in Wikipedia where you can read about many of the details Robert Ørsted-Jensen talks about in the interview. He has supplied much of the information on the wiki page.
Listen to an excerpt with the related segments in the program
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Interview with historian Robert Ørsted-Jensen about Carl Feilberg
- transcript, English translation
The Danish program on SBS Radio on 11 February 2016
"A few years ago I was reading a book written by Henry Reynolds - who is probably one of the most important historians in Australia today, especially when it comes to the relations between blacks and whites – ‘aboriginal history’, as some call it – when I suddenly discovered that I am holding the key to one of the stories that he is writing a bit about.
The key is a Danish-born journalist, or rather, a Dane, who became a journalist in Queensland, and later made a career both in Queensland and Victoria as an editor [and writer of editorials].
Unfortunately he died very young.
He was born in 1844, and died in 1887 of tuberculosis. One of the reasons why he died so early – only 43 years old – was that he was so intensely interested in changing the conditions that occurred on Queensland's frontier, the treatment of Indigenous Australians.
It was something that made him incredibly upset and angry, and he made a huge effort in this area.
So, here you have a Danish-born man, who is probably the most important Danish-born who has ever lived in the history of Australia, and at the same time, his name, Carl Feilberg, is almost unknown here.
He founded the first Danish association here in Queensland, and he did not really do much more on that front. But as a journalist he was incredibly successful.
When he died, he was editor of the Brisbane Courier, and for a time he was one of the main editors of the newspaper called Argus - which at the time was the leading newspaper in Melbourne.
And everything gathered around his struggle, the most important thing he ever did, that fills about 20 percent of his production, namely two campaigns for the Aboriginals in Queensland.
He had been on the remote frontier in the 1860s. He had seen things that shook him deeply. He was probably himself one of the men, which he later writes about, who had been together with the Native Police in a raid and had witnessed first hand what they did. And it shocked him deeply.
When you look at his own background ... Feilberg is not this “knight-type”, raised above all others. He is not someone we Danes can sit here and feel proud of as such. The story is more grim.
He was driven by conscience, because his own family had been deeply involved in slavery in the West Indies. At the time when he arrived in Australia, they had been involved in slavery through 200 years. Circumstances that lead to that his mother arrived in Denmark with a slave, who she had to discard because the Danes at that time would no longer accept slavery. The fact that his mother had slaves was something that Feilberg felt uncomfortable about, and it also gave him a conscience and an awareness about it as he arrived here in Australia. He would not see this happen again anywhere, and certainly not in his new country which he incidentally had come to, involuntarily as a result of a disease – and which he later was to lay his bones in.
Feilberg’s importance is tremendous. There is hardly a documentary or a book written about the relationship between blacks and whites in Australian history, which is not at one point or another quoting either Carl Feilberg, or the people who argued against him.
Several of the tv-documentaries we've seen on SBS cites Carl Feilberg, but never by name. The reason is very simple, that the reseachers did not know his name. In the book where Henry Reynolds writes about Carl Feilberg, he refers to him as an "unknown journalist" that he accidentally stumbled over, and which he knew had very close contacts with the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone.
That is basically the cornerstone in this story.
Another main stone is that behind the fact that Feilberg is unknown, there is a lie. A general falsehood and a lying position on Australian history, which runs very deep in modern Australia. This is a lie, which some of us think that it is incredibly important to get reversed.
We have half a million Aboriginals [and Torres Strait Islanders] in Australia today, of which a very large percentage live with the wounds and in many cases with the on-own-body experienced things that are deeply inhumane.
In Queensland, I made a calculation along with a friend of mine – Professor Raymond Evans, who is the most prominent historian of the state – based on primary sources, which shows that at least 65,000 people died in the Frontier Wars in Queensland alone. Which means that the figure for all of Australia must have been at least 100,000. And yet the talk in Australia is that this was not to be understood as a war. “It was not war,” they say, “so it's not something you should commemorate.” It was just “mistreatment of the natives,” is the highest they will agree to call it. "And it did not cost many lives," they say. Which is a huge lie.
Even the main Australian newspaper in the 1820s believed that there were perhaps three to four million Aboriginals living in Australia at the time. And they believed this on the basis of analysis – not just plucked out of the air. It is likely that that analysis focused too much on coastal areas and too little about the inner parts of the country. So half a million is a more realistic proposition. And out of these 500,000 people, a very large amount were simply shot down. They were also poisoned. And a large amount died of diseases and epidemics, which could have been avoided. Diseases which very little attention was given to.
This is the ugly story which the modern and in many ways very tolerant and beautiful Australia is founded on. And it is a story that still runs deep, deep pain cracks in the Australian community. There is a lack of will and ability both on the left and right sides of Australian politics to take this story seriously the way that it should be done, treating it as an adult.
It is about time that the nation becomes mature enough to look these things straight in the eye and use just a fraction of all the money that is being used to glorify warfare that Australia has been involved in over the years to try to to get a reasonably true picture of what actually took place in the period from 1788 to 1900.
It is an extremely unpleasant story. We have all felt this, those of us who have dug into it – Tony Roberts, Raymond Evans, Henry Reynolds and I, as well as lots of other people who have been researching on it ...
But it is a story that has – like all ugly stories – the possibility that it opens for that we can face these things down in honesty, and thus begin this process called reconsiliation.
Because there is no reconsiliation without truth.
The attitude here in Australia is that you can just ... Reconsiliation is something which should be done on the basis of forgetting. Of overlooking, of ignoring. "Let's not talk about the past, let's look forward now." Saying things like that. But you can NOT look ahead, before you have also faced the truth. And that is probably the biggest problem.
In this context, our compatriot Carl Feilberg really holds a special key. He is a man who writes about these things in a direct, hard, brutal manner. He speaks of a blindness that is with “the natives from Europe” – he talks about the whites as “native from Europe” who “regards their own customs and institutions as an excellence above compair, and a certain adoption and a certain remedy, an advantage and a substitute for all other manners of living, even the most simple and archadian," and then he writes that this attitude has led to “abnormities” which cannot be described.
It is a very, very strong story. It's a very brutal story. The story is that we all have a fellow here who have fought hard for many years, and in many ways could – with a little more attention from the Danish side, perhaps – be able to help Australia on the way to a better and more honest attitude towards its own past.
In any case, my hope – and I have done my part with this, and will continue to do my share in the coming years – is that more people will become familiar with this story – that the story can be found and read more in depth.
The day will come when there will be a movie about Carl Feilberg. His story is amazing, it is incredibly interesting, very confrontational, and it contains all the things that a good movie could be made out of. That I am sure of. But time is not ripe for this yet, certainly not here in Australia. But it might be ripe for someone in Denmark, maybe, if anyone there would be interested."
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» Another SBS interview with Robert Ørsted-Jensen – on the occation of Australia Day on 24 January 2016 - in Danish language: Australian 'war history' as seen by a Danish historian
More about Carl Feilberg
On Wikipedia - in English language
wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Feilberg
On Wikipedia - in Danish language
wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Adolph_Feilberg_(journalist)
More about reconciliation in Australia
Reconciliation Australia:
→ Home page: www.reconciliation.org.au
→ Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ReconciliationAus
The Guardian - 10 February 2016:
Closing the political gap: listen to us, engage with us, empower us
“Malcolm Turnbull says it is important to celebrate the innovation of Indigenous people. We hardly need reminding of that.” By Stan Grant
"We heard the howl of The Australian Dream, and it said to us again: 'You are not welcome'."
Stan Grant
Published on 19 January 2016, viewed 344,809 times on 10 February 2016.
Is Australia really a multicultural safe haven of equal opportunity? Or is racism more prevalent than ever before? Stan Grant took to the stage for the last IQ2 debate of 2015. His speech is widely acknowledged to be one of the most powerful ever heard at IQ2.
Stan Grant, 52, is an Australian journalist and correspondent for Sky News Australia
→ To watch the full debate, visit youtube.com/watch?v=JNHjYwPSd3w
→ To find out more about The Ethics Centre, visit ethics.org.au