February 18.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...shot and slaughtered wholesale...’
“ another reminder of the quiet extermination of Aboriginal people.”
In 1841, a man who had lived and worked on the Monaro throughout the 1830s wrote to the Sydney Gazette recalling his experience as a bushman. His letter is another reminder of the quiet extermination of Aboriginal people. In a settler culture in which the killing of Aboriginal people was forbidden by law, it was wise not to publicise the brutality of the frontier, especially after the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838.
The Aborigines have been accused of murder and the destruction of the property of settlers; this is [true] to a very limited extent...but ten blacks are [then] murdered for one white...[a fact] studiously kept from the knowledge of the authorities...If space permitted me I could...instance where the blacks have been shot and slaughtered wholesale – and by whom do you suppose? By the felons of NSW? No...but by those in a far different grade – persons who should have known better. Is the slaughter of a few head of cattle a sufficient reason for massacring and poisoning whole herds of fellow men?...That the blacks from sheer necessity are driven to spear some of the settlers' cattle is true; yet...the savage considers the white man as the wrongful possessor of his country. [1]
Michael Organ, A Documentary History of the Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines 1770-1850, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi; Sydney Gazette, 18 February, 1841.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, - An Australian History of Place, pp. 38-39, 237 n. 31.
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The unravelling of ‘the history of forgetting’.
Once the colonies federated on 1 January 1901 and the framework for the writing of national history was in place, the desire to forget the violence of the frontier, or at least dismiss it as an inevitable by-product of a far greater good, became stronger. The history required to build the nation was to be different from the history that accompanied colonisation. The nation-state and the historical profession often walked hand in hand, with every political act and gesture conscious of its place in history. Many historians sought to set Australia apart and define its identity. As white Australia and the British connection, the central ideas that sustained the nation between Federation and the 1960s, began to unravel in the late twentieth century, so too did the history of forgetting.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, p. 63.
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Native forces across the Empire*
Throughout the British Empire, armed Indigenous units were deployed against local resistance to colonisation, and to advance imperial ambitions. The British managed to conquer and hold India with the assistance of large, locally recruited Sepoy armies...Similar armed colonial formations existed in almost every corner of the British Empire, and in the lands claimed by other European powers...
The combination of Native allies and extreme violence characterised the European colonisation of the Indian subcontinent and parts of Africa. In Nigeria, ‘police violence was widespread and institutionalised during colonial rule’. [1]
...How did the Native Police in Queensland compare with other armed forces? Formations such as the Malay corps and the Cape regiment [in South Africa], mentioned by colonial officials and the public at the time, were in similar positions as security providers to colonisers. Europeans, and their Indigenous allies, killed Native people wherever they established colonies.
Etannibi E.O. Alemika and Innocent c. Chukwuma, Police-Community Violence in Nigeria (Lagos: Centre for Law Enforcement Education, 2000), 19.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp.185, 193, 195, n.49.
* For a survey of violence perpetrated by official Imperial forces (which forces included Indigenous personnel) against colonised people see Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, pp. 185-200.