March 11.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

Sustained guerrilla warfare

“...so the guerrilla war goes on.”

...related military phrases were used throughout [the period 1860-1880]. A few additional examples might serve to illustrate that the word 'guerilla' or (somewhat more rare in those days) 'guerrilla' was equally used to describe the kind of warfare we are here dealing with. It needs to be said that the earliest use of this word in Australian newspapers originates from reprinted English news-reports related to the anti-Napoleon forces during the ongoing Spanish Peninsula war in 1807-1814. From here on the term became gradually useful, also when one wished to describe skirmishes with indigenous people on the Australian frontier. The following examples draw strictly on newspaper articles related to the newly formed colony of Queensland, but similar examples from the other colonies are fairly easily obtained from contemporary newspapers now in many cases available on the net.

An editorial in the Maryborough Chronicle in March 1861 thus spoke of both sides when using the phrase 'so the guerrilla war goes on'. A Brisbane Courier editorial from April 1863 used the phrase ' guerrilla band' when describing the Native Police Force, and [the same] two frontier journals, one in April 1868, and another in June 1874, both used the phrases 'guerrilla war' and 'warfare' in relation to the contemporary situation in their own neighbourhood. [1]

The later Premier John Douglas used the phrase 'sustained guerrilla warfare' when describing the situation on the northern frontier in a letter to [the] Aborigines Protection Society in London in December 1874. A letter in the Brisbane Telegraph in August 1875 portrayed the situation as 'a kind of  guerrilla war' and a letter to the Queenslander in May 1880 from yet another prominent settler, spoke about the 'rigors of  guerrilla warfare'. An editorial in June of the same year argued for incentives to stop the 'continuing... guerrilla warfare they [Indigenous people] now carry on'. And an article in the same journal in July 1895 spoke about a ' guerrilla warfare that was carried on' in the past. [2]

1. M[aryborough] C[hronicle] 11 & 14 Mar[ch] 1861 editorials; B[risbane] C[ourier] 21 Apr[il] 1863, p3c; BC 11 May 1863, p2c, editorial; N[orthern] A[rgus Rockhampton] 1 Apr[il] 1868;  C[ooktown] H[erald] 24 June 1874, p2d.

2. MC 11 Mar 1861; BC 21 Apr 1863; NA 1 Apr 1868; CH 24 Jun 1874 p5a; J Douglas (AJCP, M2427, C133/17); Tg [The Telegraph Brisbane] 30 Aug 1875 p2; Q[ueenslander]  8 May  1880 p594c-95a; Q 5 Jun 1880 p720b-c; Q 13 Jul 1895 p87. See also Reynolds Frontier p.7-8. See also Blainey, G. A Land Half Won, Melbourne 1982, Chapter 6 'War on the Grasslands'.

Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', pp. 45-46 and n. 74,75.

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...the staggering death toll that colonisation left in its wake.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are...keenly aware of the different standards applied to their behaviour in comparison to the behaviour of the settler order itself. While Indigenous people are criminalised at an extraordinary rate, the settler state itself is rarely accused, despite the staggering death toll that colonisation left in its wake. Judy Atkinson has argued that although colonisers disregarded Indigenous peoples’ rights and used force to ‘dominate, intimidate, subdue, violate, injure, destroy and kill’, settler society still does not consider these actions to be violence ‘either morally or under the law’. [1] Henry Reynolds has argued, however, if settlers are unwilling to characterise the first 100 years post-invasion as a long and persistent war, then the only alternative is to understand that thousands of Aboriginal people were murdered in a ‘century-long, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government’. [2]

1. Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, recreating song lines: The transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, Melbourne, 2002, p.11

2. Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2013, p.136.

Acknowledgment: Sarah Maddison, The Colonial Fantasy – Why white Australia can’t solve black problems, pp.128-9