October 29.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Remembrance
How, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead?
Much of Aboriginal history since 1788 is political history...The tent Embassy of 1972 did not launch Aborigines into Australian politics but rather reminded white Australians of old truths, which had been temporarily forgotten. The questions at stake – land, ownership, development, progress – arrived with Governor Phillip and have been at the pivot of white-Aboriginal relations ever since. They are surely the most enduring issues of Australian politics and will in the long run prove to have been of much greater consequence than many questions which since the middle of [the nineteenth century have] claimed the attention of parliaments and public for a season or two.
Frontier violence was political violence and must be brought into the mainstream of our historiography. We must no longer confuse geographical remoteness with thematic irrelevance. Twenty thousand blacks had been killed before federation.* Their burial mounds stand out as a landmark of awesome size on the peaceful plains of colonial history. If the bodies had been white, our histories would be heavy with their story, monuments would mark their sacrifice. The much celebrated actions of rebel colonists are trifling in comparison. The Kellys and their kind, even the Eureka diggers and Vinegar Hill convicts, are dwarfed when measured against the hundreds of clans who fought frontier settlers for well over a century. In parts of the continent the Aboriginal death toll overshadows even that of the overseas wars of the [twentieth century]. About 5,000 Europeans from Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn died in the five wars between the outbreak of the Boer War and the end of the Vietnam engagement. But in a similar period – say the 70 years between the first settlement in North Queensland in 1861 and the early 1930s – as many as 10,000 blacks were killed in skirmishes with the Europeans in north Australia.
How, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead? White Australians frequently say that 'all that' should be forgotten. But it won't be. Black memories are too deeply, too recently scarred. And forgetfulness is a strange prescription coming from a community which reveres the fallen warrior and emblazons the phrase “Lest We Forget” on monuments throughout the land. If the Aborigines are to enter our history 'on terms of most perfect equality', as Thomas Mitchell termed it, they will bring their dead with them and expect an honoured burial. So our embarrassment is compounded. Do we give up our cherished ceremonies or do we make room for the Aboriginal dead on our memorials, cenotaphs, boards of honour and even in the pantheon of national heroes? If we are to continue to celebrate the sacrifice of men and women who died for their country can we deny admission to fallen [Aboriginals]? There is much in their story which Australians have traditionally admired. [The Aboriginals] were classical underdogs; were always outgunned, yet often faced death without flinching. If they did not die for Australia as such they fell defending their homelands, their sacred sites, their way of life. What is more [they] bled on their own soil and not half a world away furthering the strategic objectives of a distant Motherland** whose influence must be seen as of transient importance in the history of the continent. Mother England has gone – the Empire too – yet black and white Australians have still to come to terms.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 164-166.
* On an estimate of Aboriginal casualties see entry for 14 December.
** Of course the Indigenous peoples’ 'Motherland' is the continent of Australia and its islands, not some distant foreign land in another hemisphere. - RB.