Julie Wark
More often than not, the dead do not return to rejoin the living but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with disastrous consequences [… What] haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. – Nicolas Abraham
I was about six when I learned the word decapitated. Behind one of the two hotels in the main street of my hometown, Angaston, there was an abandoned quarry with a cave where two men lived. This place was totally out of bounds, so it was irresistible as a shortcut on the route from school to my best friend’s home. We skirted the cave, taking a track around the top of the quarry. We knew the men were there but, in our perfect town, named after a philanthropic founder, George Fife Angas, they didn’t exist. No one spoke of them until they died in a fire one night and, even then, perfunctorily. That was when I heard the word, apparently referring to one of the men. That’s how the word itself remained, decapitated from any real man or meaning. Who was he? Why was he living in a cave with another man? Why was he decapitated? Why? Why? Why? They were questions that could never be asked, let alone answered. They were silenced, together with other throttled questions arising from anything that cast even a shadow of doubt on the pristine image that had been carefully constructed for our settler colonial town.
I was reminded of the two men when PJ, a childhood friend, phoned the other day for a bit of a gossip. One of her friends had seen a 50-year-old from the town, enjoying a night out while his wife was in labour with their first child. The grapevine operated. PJ’s friend told her, and PJ told me. What a jerk! It wasn’t surprising but par for the course of what I know about his family. The conversation got around to the Angas Park dried fruit company, with which this man is indirectly connected. I realised then that I don’t know much about it or where I grew up. I mean I only knew the story we’d been fed, which is why decapitated unsettle(re)d me because it didn’t fit the narrative.
What I know now, after digging around in the town’s history, points to the importance of secrecy in underpinning social attitudes that maintain hierarchies and privilege. The biggest secret belongs to the town’s myth of origin. The words “settler colonialism” are never uttered. Since this is a system of murder and dispossession there must be victims, but they can’t be allowed to exist in physical form or concept. Otherwise, there’d be a counter-story. The victims’ story. The word “settlement” is comfier when “colonialism” has been decapitated from it. Then, in the void thus created, a new narrative, airbrushing and promoting settler interests, could be constructed to ensure that we, the townspeople, unquestioningly accepted our part in the real story by remaining ignorant or keeping mum about it. Unlike personal secrets in the realm of a right to privacy, secrets of the public domain are systemic. Controlling how they’re produced, presented, and suppressed is one of the “keys to power, indeed of social relations in their entirety”.
When I was at primary school, the town and the Barossa Valley where it was located had been settled for just over a hundred years by a few British families in the early 1840s, followed by large groups of Germans they imported. We were taught about the feats of those hundred years, about the foresight of George Fife Angas, a director of the South Australian Company. This commercial enterprise was essential in initiating immigration to the colony. There was never any hint that immigration of some meant expulsion of others. In 1839, Colonel William Light, South Australia’s first Surveyor General, sold George Fife Angas 28,000 acres where Angaston (now covering 19,772 acres) is located for £1 an acre. In 1843, with the settlement underway, he sent his son John Howard Angas to manage his recently acquired bit of empire. It all sounded very visionary. The place called Angaston was purged of any history before that.
Angas, still residing in England, founded the colony of South Australia as a commercial venture. But the South Australian Company, this private, convict-free initiative within Britain’s penal colony in Australia, had to be blessed by law. His Majesty required conditions, including the sale of £35,000 in land, to ensure that his realm would not be financially disadvantaged. So, Angas founded and chaired the South Australian Company, with ten directors whose names are liberally immortalised in the street names of the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Angas invested £40,000 (nearly £6 million today) in 102 lots of land of 135 acres, 13,770 acres of prime town and country real estate, and the right to rent another 220,160 acres of pastured land. How did he raise this huge amount? It’s a good question because it’s also asking about the secret origins of the colony of South Australia and its banking system.
In the person of George Fife Angas, these origins extend beyond London to British Honduras (now Belize), from which Angas was bringing mahogany for his furniture- and coach-making father after establishing his own shipping business in 1824.
Once “discovered”, Belize had been taken after 1577 by British buccaneers as an operative bolthole in waters where there was fierce competition from French and Spanish corsairs. By the end of the seventeenth century, they’d moved into the logging business, first seizing logwood cut by Spaniards, then felling bloodwood trees and, later, rainforest mahogany in such quantities that they needed a workforce. They therefore introduced a particular system of chattel slavery. On the outward journey, Angas shipped European luxury goods and plenty of alcohol for the slavers.
Source: CounterPunch
