January 25.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Civilised Resistance
“The pattern of raids conducted by Sydney people on colonists had all the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare...”
Little has been made of...raids on farms during the period [1788 to 1804], with one historian dismissing the events by saying simply that 'a discharge of buckshot convinced the Aborigines to depart in a hurry'. There are, however, several contemporary accounts from 1804 of large groups of Sydney people* - often including women and children – taking settlers' corn, clothing and blankets. Sometimes they also speared livestock and at other times settlers. The raids occurred right across the Sydney region, from Lane Cove, on the north shore, to south creek, in the west, to nearby Parramatta, the 'vicinity of the Georges River', and west and north to the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. The tactics were often similar but included opportunistic and at times quite bold variations...Throughout the year the attacks increased in number and intensity, and there were also several other skirmishes. The pattern of raids conducted by Sydney people on colonists had all the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare: raiding and retreating, and engaging the enemy only when in a superior situation. As the Gazette reported in May 1805, 'their operations are somewhat systematic and assume the appearance of a preconceived plan'. By that time Governor Philip Gidley King had had enough of this 'system of warfare', as the 'gentleman convict' James Grant described it, and issued a government and general order announcing that these 'uncivilised insurgents' near 'Parramatta, Georges River and Prospect Hill' were to be 'driven back from the settlers' habitations by firing at them'...[The Aboriginal warriors] had long practised the arts of stealthy raids and attacks upon enemies. They were, in fact, well versed in what the Europeans ultimately called guerrilla warfare.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp. 4-5, 64.
* The Sydney people - Gapps uses this term to refer to the Aboriginal people who traditionally possessed the land that was taken by the 1788 invading British military forces and settlers.
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You cannot ‘get over’ a colonial past…..
Luke Pearson asks of the settler state, ‘Do you really think that we are upset over what happened “200 years ago’, or what started 200 years ago?’:
You cannot ‘get over’ a colonial past that is still being implemented today. You cannot come to terms with a national history that the nation refuses to acknowledge ever happened. We cannot ‘reconcile’ what happened yesterday when we are too busy bracing ourselves for what will inevitably come tomorrow. [1]
1. Luke Pearson ‘Don’t tell me to “get over” a colonialism that is still being implemented today’, The Guardian, 2 April, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com.australia-news/commentisfree2016/apr/02/dont-tell-me-to-get-over-a-colonialism-that-is-still-being-implemented-today/
Acknowledgment: Sarah Maddison, The Colonial Fantasy – Why white Australia can’t solve black problems, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2019, p.xii.
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“…the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples [is] inextricably linked to colonisation…”
Noongar man and chief executive of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, Dennis Eggington,, sees the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples as inextricably linked to colonisation arguing:
We’ve been overrepresented in this prison system since day one, and it hasn’t been about breaking the law, it hasn’t been about the criminality of Aboriginal people. It’s been about how to deal with the invasion and colonisation of this land. In many ways it’s still an occupied country and it’s not the soldiers that occupy it any more, it’s the police carrying on the occupation. [1]
1. Quoted in Calla Wahlquist, ‘Indigenous advocate: “Jail is part of our life and part of being institutionalised”, The Guardian, 4 August, 2016.
Acknowledgment: Sarah Maddison, The Colonial Fantasy – Why white Australia can’t solve black problems, p.132.