December 17.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Australian frontier warfare
Silence and the continuing failure of acknowledgment.
It is important to differentiate between a technological military revolution and tactical innovation. It is true that, apart from using steel tomahawks and tipping their spears with glass chips, Aborigines fought settlers on the frontier with largely the same weapons they had previously used to fight among themselves. [1] However, while a technological military revolution did not take place in Australia, tactical innovation did. The British were a new enemy and to fight them Aborigines required new tactics. The settlers had muskets and tactics had to be developed to minimise their danger. The British took land, which had not occurred in traditional Aboriginal warfare, and used it to grow crops and graze stock. The Aborigines found that these introduced crops and animals were the means by which settlers could be most effectively attacked. Previously Aborigines had stopped fighting when they had to gather food, but now food gathering became a form of warfare and the Aborigines developed effective tactics to raid farmhouses and farms. Though raids for women had an aspect of taking property about them, the economic warfare carried out against settlers on the frontier had no precedent in traditional Aboriginal warfare. These tactics deserve to be recognised as a new form of warfare: Australian frontier warfare.
The development of Australian frontier warfare was even more remarkable because it took place in the non-hierarchical Aboriginal societies. As Morris pointed out, it is easier to enact change in a hierarchical society, and he asserts that in North America only hierarchical societies developed new forms of warfare, while egalitarian groups were unable to change and did not survive. [2] Australian frontier warfare was not a set of uniform tactics applied by each Aboriginal group in exactly the same way. Instead, it was variety of tactics developed by each individual group in response to the British invasion.
Aborigines used Australian frontier warfare tactics to retard settlement in some certain areas, but they could not prevent British encroachments over the whole frontier. The tactics did not enable Aborigines to attack farms in open country, or defeat large numbers of soldiers and settlers. However, few indigenous peoples anywhere in the world were able to defeat the British and force them to retreat. The few exceptions included the Carbs, who defeated British planters on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincentin 1772, and the Dyaks, who destroyed the East India Company trading post on Balambanga Island off the northern tip of Borneo in 1775. Even the Iroquois confederation of North America, a large nation with knowledge of agriculture, metal-working, and an arsenal of firearms, was eventually defeated by settlers. [3] The British government, through the Royal Navy and British Army, could project power to frontiers around the world; as Aboriginal numbers declined owing to disease and warfare, and settler numbers increased owing to emigration, the defeat of the Aborigines was inevitable. As Jeremy Black has written in general about colonial expansion: 'The demographic imbalance was such that the use of force, especially after the initial contact engagements, was a matter not so much of battle, but of what the invaders construed as “pacification”'. [4]
The Anzacs at Gallipoli are praised for their gallantry and resourcefulness despite their defeat by the Turks. The Aborigines' ability to create a new style of warfare and use it to fight the world's largest empire should likewise be seen as a remarkable achievement regardless of their eventual defeat.*
Evidence – Edward Wedge, 28 October 1836, HRV, 2A: 49; John Hunter (ed. John Bach), An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea 1787-1792 [1793], Royal Australian Historical Society in association with Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1968, p. 329; letter – Harris, 20 May 1791, SLNSW ML A1597; Plomley, Baudin Expedition. P 136; memo – Thomas, in Bride (ed.) Letters, p 403.
Dennis, et al (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, p 5; Eid, '“National” War', pp 139 146.
Duffy, 'World-Wide War', p 142; Black, War and the World, p 145; Armstrong Starky, European and Native American Warfare 1675-1815, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1998, p 123.
George Raudzens, 'Military Revolution or Maritime Evolution? Military Superiorities or Transportation Advantages as Main Causes of European Colonial Conquests to 1788', The Journal of Military History, 63, 1999, pp 631-42; Jeremy Black, War: Past, Present & Future, St Martin's Press, New York, 2000, p 19.
Acknowledgment: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 20-21, 129 n.77, n.78, n.79, n.80.
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* Currently it seems that there is to be perpetuated a permanent national silence at the annual Anzac Day observances held throughout Australia in regard to acknowledging the sacrifice of Indigenous people who sought to save their country. There is no remembrance of the Indigenous fallen. Note Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 165-166, and Forgotten War, pp. 237-242.– RB.