February 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Bloodlines and ‘a line of blood’
“...the advance of settlement has, upon the frontier at least, been marked by a line of blood.”
Anyone acquainted with conditions on the Australian frontier knew that bloody work had been done. Writing in 1880 the pioneer ethnographers Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt declared:
It may be stated broadly that the advance of settlement has, upon the frontier at least, been marked by a line of blood. The actual conflict of the two races has varied in intensity and in duration...But the tide of settlement has advanced along an ever-widening line, breaking the native tribes with its first waves and overwhelming their wrecks with its flood. [1]
We will never know how many Aborigines died directly or indirectly as a result of the conflict. How wide or deep was the line of blood...Much of the killing happened on the edge of settlement in regions remote from the reach of authority. Because there was no official recognition of a state of war any killing was technically murder. Frontier communities were notorious for keeping secret their exploits in the war. Killing was referred to using a lexicon of known euphemisms. Punitive parties may often not have known how effective their attacks were, particularly when they operated in the dark or if they shot at groups some distance away. When the bodies of victims were encountered they were almost universally burnt to destroy the evidence. The long career of the Queensland Native Police was cloaked in official secrecy and most of the records were destroyed. [2]
L Fison & A W Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Anthropological Publications, Oosterhout, 1967 (first published 1880), p. 182.
See E Orsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited: Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', Lux Mundi Publishing, Brisbane, pp. 253-56.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 121-123, 264, n.1, n.3.
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“The bodies of Aboriginal people were emaciated by colonisation...”
It is true that a certain fatalism crept in as Aboriginal people witnessed death and destruction around them. Derrimut, a Boonwurrung man, exclaimed to William Hull, a settler, in the 1840s: 'You see...all this mine, all along here Derrimut's once; no matter now, me soon tumble down...Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children, no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now'. Billibellary also reported: 'the Black lubras say now no good children, Blackfellow say no country now for them, very good we kill and no more come up Pickaninny'. [1] Without their land, their places to hunt and their sacred sites to give meaning to their lives, some felt life was simply not worth living.
There are clues to the outcomes of demographic disaster. The death of 80 per cent of the population created huge gaps in their kinship system, left children without close guardians, made correct marriage partners scarce and ceremonial obligations difficult to perform. Much ceremonial life was lost as ceremonies formerly held over days became impossible to sustain without access to sites and without sufficient elders with deep knowledge of the law. Adults who were once providers and conveyors of knowledge were reduced to beggars and scroungers on the fringes of white society. Stress, and perhaps even mental illness, pushed people to alcohol abuse and violence. The bodies of Aboriginal people were emaciated by colonisation...The disruptions were obviously countless and complex, and now largely unknowable.
Cited in Blaskett, 'The Aboriginal Response to White settlement', pp. 288-9.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians,– A history since 1788, pp. 77-79, 387 n.61.