The Audit

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The Audit is a piece of short creative non-fiction which details a list of charges laid against the Australian Federal Government for reparations owed to First Nations People. It is narrated from the perspective of an auditor who has been given the job of tallying the cost of the damage done. Although it is fiction, the representation of facts in this piece is thoroughly researched.

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The audit was excruciating. There isn’t a word like excruciating. Some words just sound as they mean.

It was a crucifixion. It dawned on me late in the audit that it was the second time the old people had been hung upon a cross. The old people were crucified first 200 years ago, when a gallows was mounted and they were ordered to climb onto its crossbeam – which they did to escape the flood – but before they could climb down, the steps were dragged away and nooses cast around their necks, and those that jumped to free themselves were hanged.

The second crucifixion was committed to their bones, and I am the final man involved, like an illustrator standing aside at the dissection of a hanged person sketching what he sees. The audit was excruciating, and I have nearly finished my final statements. I see, written in the numbers, how many nails were used to crucify them. They were crucified, although they did not know the Latin. Cruciatus in cruce. Excruciating.

Looking back, I would never have taken the job had I have known what was involved. I tendered a high quote, hoping they would give it to someone else. But despite the price, they gave me the job. Money must be no object to them.

At first I needed to catalogue the number of skulls that had been stolen, and then the number of casts made of those skulls, and then the number of copies of the casts made of those skulls. Once I knew how many facsimiles had been made, I needed to trace which museums they had been bartered to, and which artworks had been bought with their value.

The museums in Tasmania had amassed the skulls of Aboriginal people, and with this rare commodity they traded with international museums for rare works of art.

I valued those artworks twice: then and now. I calculated the compounding interest over the years. Whatever the value was then, was owed. Whatever the interest accrued, was owed. The Royal Society Museum in Hobart did not buy those works with its own money. It bought them with dead capital. It bought them with human skulls. And in the absence of the people whose eyes once sat in those skulls, the living descendants were owed back-pay. It is they who loaned their dead ancestors’ capital for so long.

Human capital is an interesting thing. It is very difficult to quantify. In most cases, social capital is the accrual of goodwill between one person and another for favours rendered, time spent, or for similes of character. In the audit, human capital went beyond the goodwill of human beings. It became the capital generated by slave workers.

A person can work for another, unpaid, and their labour will generate money. When that person dies (usually due to their labour), the capital remains in whatever works they achieved in life. It is bound up in the buildings they built or the crops they sowed, which are inevitably sold, rented or eaten. And it grows more valuable, unless destroyed.

It is fair to say they are owed payment for their work in life, and if the work killed them, owed severance for their demise at the task. If they are not around to claim it, someone should be entitled to. If we are a society who acknowledges the progeny of a person to be the heirs of their last will and testament, then it is the descendants of the Aborigines who are entitled to their loss.

The capital generated by Aboriginal skulls in Tasmania has never been repaid. And there are people mourning it. Their living people mourn it.

The convicts built most of Australia’s institutions under appalling conditions, but at last they were emancipated, and most of them were able to iron the creases of their old lives and establish families. Eventually the sons and daughters scooped the cream off the top of their ancestors’ work; they became Australian ratepayers who were entitled to the usage of the institutions their incarcerated antecedents built up.

But so much more was stolen from First Nations people – let alone their heads. In the last days of her life, Truganini pleaded with Reverend Atkinson to be burned upon her death, for her ashes to be scattered in the deepest part of D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

I know that when I die the Tasmanian Museum wants my body, she said. How many of us can fathom requesting, upon death, to have our body bagged with a stone and tossed into the sea? How many of us can imagine asking such a thing honestly and fervently and with lip-cracked fright? I don’t think many of us can.

It took a century for Truganini’s remains to be cremated in accordance with her wishes – I suppose we were busy exterminating the thylacine – but before that, the Museum had its way with her. In that time the kin of Truganini were not paid dues for the income earned by the Museum, from attendants who gawked at the bones of the last Tasmanian.

Moving on from the skulls – once I had catalogued all the artworks bought with Aboriginal skulls, I was ready to tally up the score. And it was huge. Millions. This was only the artwork.

In 1820, Vandemonian settler Edward Lord had accrued assets in excess of 200,000 pounds sterling. That was 250 times the governor’s annual salary of 800 pounds.

Some estimates at average inflation put the modern value of his fortune at 36 million Australian dollars. But economists are not historians. Neither is an auditor, but I will try to illustrate the point.

To use the commodity example: a gallon of Dutch gin was worth 14 shillings and sixpence per gallon in 1813. That is the equivalent of three litres of gin, which costs $210 today. Therefore, if we measured in gin, Lord’s 200-thou could buy 825,000 litres. That’s a 60-million-dollar hangover.

But by the same token – a commodity which has inflated less, being wheat grain – was worth 10 shillings per bushel in 1813. The same weight is worth an average of $5.45 today. If Lord had spent all his money on bushels of wheat instead, and had kept it fresh in the silos for 200 years, that wheat would only be worth 2 million dollars today. His money would have been better invested in gin.

Values, opinions, stock markets – they shift like the sands. The best example, therefore, is the governor’s salary. Today, the governor of Tasmania earns $427,000 per annum. This makes Edward Lord’s 200-thou equivalent to a modern hundred million. This is what has made the audit so excruciating. I can resolve the numbers through averages – that’s fine. But the reason I compare is to help me quantify the sheer scale of what has been taken away.

This vast fortune also included Edward Lord’s 3,000 acre estate at Pitt Water – try valuing that in today’s terms, after it has been sold and subdivided and developed and sold again. Pitt Water was awarded to him because the poor sycophant was denied the position of lieutenant-governor. Imagine if he was given the government? Thankfully he was denied, but even that did not rescue the office from abuse. After all, a man like William Crowther was made premier, and he was the person who stole Truganini’s skull. A fine model of public service.

But Lord did not need to be lieutenant-governor to become filthy rich. In the early days of Van Diemen’s Land, the entire aristocracy was corrupt. The commissariat department was defrauded by its deputy-commissary and clerks. The graziers earned huge profits off free government labour and Aboriginal land, freely distributed by the government of New South Wales, which did not pay its original landlords stamp duty.

Calculating rent in arrears was harder. I had to assess all the land grants, all the selections, all the pegs that squatters drove into the ground from Margaret River to the Blue Mountains, from the days of free selection to the date of Federation. That was huge. The whole country was taken up, in one way or another, from the Martian stock-routes of the inner north-west to the sea-grasses of Gippsland – and its first people dispossessed.

The time after Federation was harder to account for. I nearly had a mental breakdown over it. Imagine calculating the entirety of the wealth generated in stamp duty for purchases of subdivided Aboriginal land, for interest paid to the Commonwealth bank for mortgage payments on 30 year terms, for capital gain accrued by private investors. It represents twenty per cent of the nation’s money. And it ticks along even still.

I had to cut off my calculations at the year 1999. I could not even take into account the 21 years that followed, because the value of the dollar has only decreased, and the price of real estate has boomed, and the change of money is absurdly large and frequent. I am afraid when the account is settled, no matter what number I come up with, my client will still be short-changed, because it is impossible to calculate the dollar to the day, for the minutes tick by unheeded.

Trauma cannot be quantified, so I did not even try to calculate what would be owed for the theft of children over a century and a half. I did not even try.

I did not even try – because the first children were taken from the Paritarama in Tasmania on day one; when schools were intentionally established to breed out the black; when small-pox-orphaned children watched their parents lay on beaches up and down New South Wales, curled in painful knots.

Yes, I could not charge reparations for the diseases. There is no such thing as chemical warfare in colonial settings. But, like the destruction of environments, there is still an element of culpability.

I placed these complex problems to one side, because there were more daunting files to tackle – good God, the wildlife – how many millions of animals have been slaughtered by foxes and rodents and cats? I didn’t audit the sealers for the seals and shearwaters, because they’ve been saved, they’ve been conserved, and I didn’t audit the settlers for the Tasmanian emu or the koala or the mainland quoll, because the Aborigines contributed to the extinction of the megafauna. But Jesus, the Bilby has only just been reintroduced to the Mallee. So I did audit the murder of the thylacine, because that was just wasteful.

What is a wild animal worth? The thylacine could be quantified by translating the one-pound bounty paid out into today’s money. Then I worked out what it costs to keep a single Tasmanian Devil alive and applied that algorithm to the population estimate of 5,000 tiger’s at the time of first contact.

While I couldn’t audit the baleen trade and the near extinction of the Southern Right whale, I worked hard on the negligent introduction of foreign species. Not only did ferals kill other animals, they destroyed and continue to destroy habitats. The grazing sheep that gnawed the yam daisy were not only guilty of environmental destruction, they played a distinct role in the starvation of Aboriginal people who could not find their habitual foods.

There were more criminal charges against the sheep, principally the sheer amount of capital earned from the wool trade – a pillar of Australia’s economy – as well as a share in the sales of mutton, hogget and lamb, and then the cost of rejuvenating old pastures, together with the collective lives of the nations of Port Phillip and New South Wales. The payout of the wool industry will nearly bankrupt the government.

Kangaroos are an interesting one. Because of the reduction in hunting on the mainland and the thinning of the dingo, kangaroo numbers have grown unabated. The government is culpable in this too. As a corollary, there is more to introduced species than foxes and cattle – there is the disturbance of original harmony, which the Indigenous people (having been on Country for so long) had established themselves.

Their own actions can be considered environmental, because they watched as the molten lava formed the rocks – they earned that right. But the Europeans were invaders, in a few cases unwitting, and the movement of the kookaburra to Tasmania and the displacement of the shearwater to southern rookeries and the abundance of the kangaroo are all problems too. One way that I quantified the cost of the harmony imbalance was by calculating the cost of reintroducing dingoes, for example, to the mainland.

Then there’s the bushfires. The government owes its current population for that one. I scaled back the cost of undoing seventy thousand years of work to tally that one. If a family had spent its lifetime cultivating an organic farm, and its neighbour spread super phosphate and other chemicals which cancelled their organic registration, then the family would be within its rights to sue for damages. I calculated damages based on the work involved in returning the land to its original productivity. And there is so much to do.

The salinity of the land, the rape of the Menindee Lakes, the disregard for the Goyder line, the irreparable neglect of the bush left to burn and regrow sick, and fall down in logging coupes and thread and thin and bald where it shouldn’t. There was billions upon billions in that alone.

So I sit in the shadows of stacks of paper. I am spent. My head is split with excruciating pain. It has been torture. Cruciatus. But it is not over yet. I cannot see myself balancing another account after this, but my work is only half the job. I can come up with the number – someone else has to get them to pay.

Auditor. For the plaintiff, First Nations of Australia.