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.
Although there were clashes during the convict era, the real conflict got under way from the 1840s when transportation ended and the areas north of the Tweed were opened to free settlers. Over the next half a century the Europeans gradually pushed north and west from Brisbane until by the end of the 1800s the whole of Queensland was effectively in British hands.
The process went like this. The British colonists would arrive with their sheep and cattle and settle in, building huts for the boss and the workers, watering the stock at the best waterholes and setting them to graze on the grasslands. Of course this beautiful rich country was already inhabited and along the way they would meet its original owners. Perhaps these would be friendly at first, or perhaps they had heard about these invaders along the songlines and tried to warn them off straight away. However it started , soon enough the conflict would escalate.
Sometimes it would be the result of a cultural misunderstanding. For instance, a common feature of traditional Welcome to Country ceremonies is a challenge, which involves people yelling and waving their spears at the visitors. The visitors will then acknowledge the authority of the custodians and they will settle down to whatever business or pleasure they have come there for. But of course the British didn't know this and thought they were about to be attacked so they would fire at the people threatening them.
Other times there was no misunderstanding. In many cases there was some sort of atrocity perpetrated on the traditional custodians - a rape, say, or a child abduction - which would bring about a reprisal. In other cases, the custodians would realise that the invaders had come to stay and take steps to force them off, like spearing their stock, stealing their food or killing solitary stockmen.
However it started, before too long things would escalate. Sometimes the station owners and workers would band together and form their own posse, chasing after whoever had attacked them and shooting them and any other Aboriginal person they found along with way. Other times they would call on the Native Police to do the dirty work. Either way the outcome would be the same - there would be indiscriminate killing of those who might have committed the attacks and those who hadn't, including old people, women and children.
At other times the invaders would be more sneaky. They would give their neighbours gifts of flour laced with arsenic, or leave it where they knew it would be stolen. Aboriginal people would take it, cook it up, and then die in agony beside their campfires.
Bottoms' book is a gruesome chronicle of these events, which appear on almost every one of the 200+ pages of Conspiracy of Silence. At the front of the book is a set of maps showing the locations of over 200 confirmed massacres, with a massacre defined as a killing of 5 or more people. He says there are likely to be many more that can't be verified, not to mention killings of less than five. He quotes an estimate by his mentor, Professor Raymond Evans, that somewhere around 50,000 people were murdered - he regards this as a conservative estimate.
Of course it won't do to paint Aboriginal peoples as passive victims of this violence. There are two ways in which this would be wrong. First of all, as the current SBS documentary series tells us, this was a war. The original custodians did not simply accept the takeover of their lands, they fought back. Both sides had their advantages in this conflict. The British had guns and horses, while Aboriginal people had spears and clubs and travelled on foot. On the other hand, Aboriginal people had far superior bushcraft and knowledge of the country, and in the first phases of colonisation in any location they had substantial numerical superiority. This meant that sometimes in the initial phases of the conflict the colonists would be forced to abandon their runs.
However, over time this balance tipped. The British would return in greater numbers and with increased firepower, and over time they would get to know the country for themselves. And then, of course, they could also bring in the Native Police, and this brings us to the other way in which Aboriginal people were not passive. There were Aboriginal people on both sides of the conflict.
The job of the Native Police, put quite simply, was to go to places where Aboriginal people were disturbing or threatening white colonists and 'disperse' them. 'Dispersal' was a euphemism, appearing over and over again in official incident reports, for massacring them. Sometimes all the people would simply be killed, men and women, old and young. Sometimes some would be spared for a while - women and girls might be initially saved from the carnage, then raped and killed later or kept as slaves. Sometimes children would be taken back to camp and trained as servants or given to other white people. Even many station owners were shocked at the brutality and regretted ever having called for help.
The official instructions for the Native Police were to only use such force as was necessary to prevent further trouble. Occasionally an officer would be disciplined or dismissed for excessive brutality but they were never charged with any offences, and their actual offence was to perform their acts of violence in front of European witnesses. Officers were officially forbidden from taking non-police colonists with them when they committed their crimes so there would be nobody present who could testify. However, this instruction was often ignored in the field. Sometimes a local station owner or employee would come with them to guide them to the people they were there to 'disperse', and of course help with the killings. Sometimes posses of station people with team up with Native Police. For every European who deplored the violence there were ten who applauded it, and when questions about this practice were raised in the Brisbane or Sydney papers, people closer to the frontier would pour scorn on them.
Jonathan Richards tells us a lot about the European officers who commanded Native Police squads. Some, particularly in the senior ranks, were ex-military. others were police officers or other sorts of colonial adventurers. Some only lasted months, others decades. Some went on to become regular police officers, public servants or magistrates. He has short biographies of every one of the more than 200 Europeans who served in the force from 1858, when the newly created Queensland colonial government took over control from its counterpart in NSW, until it was finally wound down around the turn of the century.
However, I wanted to know about the Aboriginal troopers. Who were they, and why were they there? On this subject, Richards is surprisingly unenlightening. There were no proper personnel records of the troopers. We don't even have their names. They are simply referred to by single European names which are almost certainly not the names their families gave them - Jacky, Gulliver, Wallace, Echo, Ned and so forth. We don't know where each of them came from, how long they served for, and we certainly don't know what they thought about their jobs. However, we do have some clues.
There were not that many of them. From Richards' account there seem to have been fewer than 200 at any one time, and maybe around 2,000 served across the entire history of the force. The preference was to recruit them from a long way from the frontier, so that they would not feel any loyalty towards the people they were 'dispersing'. The first recruits for the Queensland force came from the Murray River area of NSW. Later recruits came from South East Queensland, the Darling Downs, the Fraser Coast and other parts of southern Queensland. This certainly seems to have made it easier for them to take part in the killings.
How were they recruited? What were they told, or offered, to induce them to sign up? To what extent did they have a choice? This is very unclear. One thing we do know is that desertions were frequent. Some deserted almost as soon as they arrived, which suggests this was not what they had expected. Troopers who deserted were hunted down, returned to their units and punished before being put back into service. Some managed to escape, even walking hundreds of kilometers back to their home country. But most did not. Clearly, once they signed up they were not given the option to leave before the end of their assigned term.
Some were also given a kind of Hobson's choice - their prison sentences could be cut short provided they agreed to sign up for the Native Police. Kind of a reverse character test. It also seems that for many their other alternatives were limited - their own people had already been colonised and 'dispersed', they had no prospects on their own country, and this was one of their few ways to escape disease and hunger.
But perhaps these are all excuses. Because the brutality of the Native Police, black and white, was notorious. They were not killing reluctantly, or in self-defence. They were relentlessly hunting their fellow humans and ruthlessly gunning them down, men, women, children, old people, any black person they found. Even station employees were not safe. If you were Aboriginal and in their zone of operation your life was at risk. They were an elite death squad.
In the 19th century none of this was secret. Although there was a veil of euphemism cast around their actions the nature of frontier violence was very clear, both that carried out by the Native Police and that carried out by posses of civilians. The subject was reported and debated in the press. Inquests were held. Humanitarian correspondents called for the abolition of the Native Police and were shouted down by station owners and small town civic leaders. Overall, frontier killings were at least permitted, and often tacitly encouraged, by the colonial government.
It only started to become a secret much later. Bottoms suggests this was linked to the push for federation and the upsurge of nationalism that went with it. For the first time people started to conceive of 'Australia' as a nation and it wasn't helpful to the creation of nationalistic fervour to acknowledge that the nation was created through mass murder. So the story just began to be written out of our histories. In its place we got the Pioneer Myth, the stories of the brave explorers and hardy stockmen who brought civilisation to an empty land.
This is what anthropologist WEH Stanner called 'The Great Australian Silence', and it is the version of the story I learnt as a six year old immigrant in 1967. As we entered Australia we were given a little booklet that told us we wouldn't see many Aboriginal people because these mysterious ancient people preferred to live where they had always lived, way out in the central deserts. Later on our school lessons in Australian history put Aboriginal people at the start, living in gunyahs and hunting kangaroos with spears. As soon as Captain Cook sailed over the horizon on board the Endeavour they mysteriously disappeared.
We now know this was a pack lies, but up until now we have kept acting as if it was true. To finish this short review it's hard to go past Timothy Bottoms' closing words.
No Australian today is responsible for what happened on our colonial frontier. But we are responsible for not acknowledging what happened. If we do not, our integrity as a nation is flawed and we are shamed as a people for perpetuating a lie.
How we will respond as a nation will reflect our own maturity. British colonisation of this island continent resulted in several thousand whites being killed, and an enormous indigenous death toll, in Queensland approaching the numbers of Australians killed during the First World War. When the nation really understands the humanity and suffering of Aboriginal Australians, their spirited and justifiable defence of their territory, and gives full recognition to frontier crimes, along with their mistreatment 'under the Act' since then, then we can speak of truly genuine reconciliation and, truly, a more honest national spirit. The incredible part of all of this is that Aboriginal Australians have survived and twenty-first century Australia will be the richer for their taking their rightful place in our national identity.
Right now we have a fabulous opportunity to make a start on this task by listening to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, voting to embed a First Nations voice to parliament in our constitution and beginning the difficult process of truth-telling and treaty-making. Let's not blow it this time!
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