Secret Histories

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. With a riff on Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, the Australian historian Humphrey McQueen writes, “Without chattel slaves, the Angases have no mahogany to import and no market for their exports; without those profits they have no hoard. It is chattel-slavery which gives the South Australian Company its founding philanthropist. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance for free settlement.”

So, a good part of George Fife Angas’s fortune came from “his family’s wage-slaves who crafted furniture out of Honduran mahogany harvested by chattel-slaves” and the Atlantic trade that serviced the slave economies. But the huge sum required to set up the South Australian Company came from compensation after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was passed, freeing British “property” of 800,000 African slaves. Less well-known is the fact that the Act (British taxpayers) provided for financial compensation of slave owners for the loss of said “property”. Angas collected £6,942 in 1835, acting as an agent for slave-owners in London. For him, this felicitously coincided with the fact that once the Caribbean “was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slaveowners chose [Australia] as the next frontier of empire.” Abolition coincided with a restructuring of the East India Company to become the proxy government of India. This upheaval in the western and eastern halves of Empire led to a surge in the colonisation of Australia and what more respectable way to go about it than to apply colonial enthusiast, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s principles of land commodification, wage-labour, and forced migration, dressed up as philanthropy where possible?

With the green light of the colonial Act, Angas met Pastor August Ludwig Kavel who was aiding (mainly Silesian) Lutherans being persecuted by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm and arranged for them to emigrate. One websiteadds, letting out the secret that George Fife Angas’s help to the Silesian immigrants wasn’t entirely disinterested, that by 1850, “encouraged by the income he was receiving from his German tenants” (who called him Your Honour), George Fife Angas had emigrated to Australia. Eventually, the Angases from the Collingrove and Lindsay Park homesteads accrued a pastoral empire covering 12 million acres of South Australia (about 5% of the total). Their dynastic power is recognised in Adelaide where the High Court, the Federal Court and the South Australian Police headquarters are all established in Angas Street.

But rectitude had to be bastioned. In 1862, Robert Harrison was asked to write a history of that “virtuous territory which should be palatable to certain classes of a small community”. But describing George Fife Angas, he wrote that his aim in life, “was to accumulate cash, study the principles of banking and investment, with a little theology read backwards to lull him into the pleasing belief that he was eminently adapted for a celestial sphere”. This was most unpalatable, so “every copy available was purchased and destroyed by the Angas family”.

The biggest unspoken lie of my childhood was a resounding absence. Absence of the people who’d given beautiful toponyms to the surrounds of Angaston: the Angas homestead, Tarrawatta (plenty of water); the town of Nuriootpa (Nquraitpa, a meeting place); town of Tanunda (waterhole); town of Kapunda (leaping water or spring). But there was no sign of the people who’d been disconnected from them. They didn’t exist in physical presence or in school history books. They were simply cleared away for, unlike what happened in other parts of Australia, this land hadn’t been decreed terra nullius. The only sign of them a hundred years later was the place names they’d left behind, now decapitated words hinting at something too shameful to speak of. With all the German names—Heuzenroeder, Feibiger, Schmidt, Roesler, and many more—connected to people, our neighbours, and the desolate absence of other people, mutely wailed by the Aboriginal toponyms, it was evident even to a child that there was some kind of lethal equation: get rid of some people and replace them with others.

The original Peramangk, Kuarna, and Ngadjuri people hadn’t been directly massacred, as happened to many other First Peoples of Australia, but they were dispossessed of their traditional land, which is one way of murdering people who are so united to place. They were dispersed, confined on missions, and died of introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, measles, tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, diarrhoea, and dysentery. The places they’d named for their qualities were given the stamp of empire with new names denoting quantifiable possession. Angaston street names—Fife, Murray, French, Dean, Sturt, and Hodder (after George Fife Angas’s hagiographer), for example—ratified the settlers’ land grabs in the town’s public spaces.

Today, one of the Angaston “Heritage” websites has a politically correct “Acknowledgement of Country”: “The land that today we call Angaston has been the spiritual and physical home of the Peramangk, Nadjuri and Kaurna people since the dawn of time. We acknowledge this ongoing connection, and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.” Needless to say, information about Angaston and its surrounds as a “spiritual home” or how it was snatched from people who’d been there since the “dawn of time” is absent. Like the people.

Settler colonial claims to and uses of the land require permanence, which means “notional” as well as “actual elimination” of the First People. An early account by George French Angas, in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847, pp. 215-216) is filtered through the entrepreneurial worldview of the South Australian Company, just a few years after his father George Fife expelled the Peramangk, Ngadjuri and Kaurna people: “The settlers’ homesteads frequently display an air of comfort quite inviting: the white buildings peeping through the trees, and the lazy cattle reposing beneath the shade of some umbrageous eucalyptus”. He rejoices that the hills around Angaston “abound in minerals: chalcedony, opal, iron, marble, copper. And an almost endless variety of mineral substances … [that] will undoubtedly become of great value, and increase in quality as they are worked below the surface”. The once sacred land is now pastured and ripped open. It eventually yields a cave-in-a-quarry-where-a-man-was-decapitated.

Returning to the present, there are enduring ideological as well as physical effects of this settlement, partly resulting from strategies of elision and euphemism used to cover slave trade profits. Thanks to the abolitionist humanitarian discourse favoured by George Fife Angas, it became démodé to justify subordination and dispossession of Black people on grounds of innate racial inferiority. Deemed too primitive to be proper inhabitants (users) of the land, their “backwardness” was the excuse for wrenching them from their non-capitalist traditions and subjecting them to the civilising regime of missions, which were actually reserves with little or no government control. There, they would die unnoticed and unremembered. For descendants of those First People who survived, the result of all this is undermining of identity, outsider status, and inequalities of health and wellbeing through to the present day.

Essentially unchallenged, the secret Angaston history of exploitation eventually boomeranged back to the Americas. Angas Park, the famous dried fruit company established in 1911, was acquired in 1987 by racehorse breeder Colin Hayes (so exploitation of and cruelty to horses, also enter the story of Angaston’s success) and his son-in-law, Paul Mariani. Then, it was described as a $40 million company. Hayes, whose racing associates included Dubai’s Sheik Hamden and Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, owned the most prestigious of the Angas properties, Lindsay Park, bought from George Fife Angas’s grandson, Sir Keith Angas in 1965. Together with Tarrawatta, it now belongs to a Hong Kong billionaire. In 2000, Hayes and Mariani sold Angas Park to Chiquita for $53 million. The deal was praised as a “win-win situation” in the South Australian Legislative Council on 31 May 2000 by Liberal (conservative) party member Caroline Schaefer, who quotes Mariani: “…it is good for our shareholders, good for our employees and management, all of whom will remain, and it’s good for the local community and South Australian industry as well.” Good for the community? There’s nothing “community” about Chiquita.

The United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, later became United Brands Company in 1970, and then Chiquita in 1990. It was notorious for grave crimes in Latin America and, in particular, the 1928 “Banana massacre” in Ciénaga, Colombia, which Gárcia Márquez famously fictionalised in A Hundred Years of Solitude. It was famous for an advertising campaign called The Great White Fleet, with cruise liners that took American adventurers—also encouraged to wear white—to Central America to show them its plantations (where conditions for dark-skinned workers actually presented a “clear overtone of slavery”). In Guatemala, where the government of President Jacobo Árbenz had introduced land reform measures, United Fruit, joined by the CIA, orchestrated a coup in 1954, which ushered in 40 years of violence called the Guatemalan Genocide in which an estimated 200,000 people were murdered. None other than US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles had negotiated the 1930 United Fruit land grab in Guatemala (and Honduras) and, prior to the coup, the company had been able to persuade President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure and threaten Árbenz. Eisenhower and many other prominent US government officials had considerable stock in United Fruit.

The name changed but the tactics remained the same. Chiquita is notorious for mistreating workers on its Central American plantations, pollution, cocaine trafficking, bribery of foreign officials, and illegal land transactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, around the time it came to “be good for the local community” of Angaston, Chiquita (and other corporations like Fresh Del Monte Produce, and Hyundai) were paying the Colombian far-right paramilitary and drug trafficking group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). This didn’t remain so secret as, in 2007, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay more than $38 million in damages to families of AUC victims. It was the first of many wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits.

If you uncover one secret, it usually leads you to more. Chiquita also uses aerial spraying of hazardous pesticides without warning workers or providing them with protection. As if Guatemala weren’t castigated enough by the company’s activity, Chiquita has been sued for continuing to poison its villages with “pesticide showers”. Genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave human rights abuse come hand in hand with ecocide so, to return to the source of George Fife Angas’s wealth, Belize, his success has shaped the country’s culture through settler control of large areas of forest and uncontrolled logging of certain species, especially with the change of logwood to mahogany, which requires a large labour force and significant capital outlay. Hence a small wealthy class established the country’s “unique slave system”, which means that few people have engaged in smallholder agriculture. By 2014 Belize had lost 40% of its forest cover. Large sugar cane, corn, citrus, and banana plantations, using huge amounts of agrochemicals and mercury, are damaging the soil and polluting rivers and coastal zones.

Three and four generations on from George Fife Angas, Hayes and Mariani introduced Chiquita and its human rights and environmental crimes into Angaston as “good for the local community”. Well, at least it fitted neatly enough with the hidden slave-based foundational story. One aspect of secrets about abuse is that they not only enable more abuse, but they also cause social breakdown because, unable to see any difference between lies and truth, people don’t know right from wrong, so they’ll go along with anything that seems not to affect them directly. But it’s not only people and environments in Australia, in Belize, in Guatemala, and Colombia, to start with, who are affected. Once recent indication of a global emergency, showing yet again that everything is interconnected, is monkeypox, but problems like this will never be solved until questions about their real origins are answered. No wrong can be righted until the true nature of the wrong is known.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew all too well that humans find Miracle, Mystery, and Authority easier to accept than the moral responsibilities required by knowledge of harsh truths: “Did we not love mankind when we admitted so humbly its impotence and lovingly lightened its burden and allowed mankind’s weak nature to sin so long as it was with our permission.” Late capitalism, decked out in its delusive miracle, mystery, and authority, gives permission to any sin that benefits it and, wantonly ignoring its own secrets, the ones it imposes so it can keep exploiting, is destroying the planet that sustaines it, together with its people (except, perhaps, a few billionaires in bunkers), creatures, land, air, and seas.

Postscript

I grew up playing with fourth-generation Angas kids, visited their houses, knew their families. The secrets were palpable enough in all the rules entailed by socialising with them (in one family, the temperature of the bathwater was taken by a nurse before the kids could get in the tub). But I didn’t know then that they were secrets. It was more like an asphyxiating atmosphere. There was a big secret in my own family too. My father, who expressed socially acceptable anti-Semitic views and said he was Catholic, was Jewish on his mother’s side. I only found out when he died. He’d turned his back on his family. I know very little about them, but this wasn’t so unusual in a newish settler colony in which many people, some 20%, are descended from transported convicts and keen to hide their criminal ancestry, even while wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating the work of bigger criminals by accepting their secrets. In Angaston (for me, Angstown) there are many things you can’t talk about. If you give voice to them, you pay the price. I was eventually disinherited and declared “feral” by my family when I started trying to articulate the “gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. The break is hard but being feral, in a wild state after escape from domestication, is fine. And I still have my childhood friends, like PJ.

I bucked against secrets without knowing what they were. I still don’t know a lot of them. Just enough to understand that if a crime against human rights is kept secret, it will continue to be committed in new forms and with new names, including philanthropy. These crimes are not decapitated instances, cut off from general society, because they’ll eventually affect everyone, even while today’s oligarchs are trying to keep secret what its system has wrought, and what it’s doing to the planet.

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