Painting Fakes

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He ...