November 18.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
…trauma was magnified…
….trauma was magnified...
[Indigenous] family groups were torn apart, kinship networks were severely disrupted, and when elders were killed much of the collective knowledge and wisdom was lost forever. And the trauma was magnified because it was often the case that all the rituals surrounding death had to be abandoned.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, p. 190.
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The complicity of two state Premiers
[Historian] Chris Owen in his recent study on policing of the Kimberley frontier from 1882 to 1905 entitled ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’, observed that by the mid 1890s the police had begun systematically eradicating Aboriginal people from pastoral land and that the government was aware of what was happening. In July 1895 [Premier John] Forrest’s undersecretary Octavius Burt wrote a memo to him stating that ‘there can be no doubt that from these frequent reports that a war of extermination is being waged on those unfortunate blacks in the Kimberley district…’ Owen added that there was no indication that either Forrest ur the commissioner of police took any action after reading Burt’s memo.
The same complicity in extreme violence is apparent in the career of John Downer, who was premier [of South Australia] when the grasslands of the Gulf Country were thrown open for settlement. In his 2009 essay “The brutal truth: what happened in the Gulf country’, [1] Tony Roberts investigated the extent to which governments in Adelaide condoned or turned a blind eye to frontier massacres in the Gulf Country up until 1910. He estimated that at least 600 men, women, children and babies, or about one sixth of the population, were killed. No one was charged with these murders. There were twenty white deaths. There was, he observed, no regard for the legal and human rights of the Aboriginal owners of the land, no explanations, no consultations.
Tony Roberts, “The Brutal Truth - What happened in the Gulf Country”, The Monthly, November, 2009, p.5. www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1330478364/tony-roberts/brutal-truth
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 221-222.
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“...away with them, disperse them, shoot and poison them...
“It is the fashion usually, to speak of these poor people as '[A]borigines': the idea meant to be conveyed being that they are a relic, so to speak, of the past, intruders in the path of the white man, and to be improved from the face of the earth accordingly. The argument seems to be, that God never intended them to live long in the land [sic] in which He had placed them. Therefore, says the white man, in his superiority of strength and knowledge, away with them, disperse them, shoot and poison them, until there be none remaining; we will utterly destroy them, their wives and their little ones, and all that they have, and we will go in and possess the land. This is no rhapsody or overstatement, but represents, in words, the actual policy which has been pursued towards the natives of the Australian colonies, and which is being acted upon vigorously in Queensland today.” [1]
George Carrington, Colonial Adventures and Experiences, Bell and Daldy, London, 1871, pp. 143-44. Despite Carrington's concerns for Aboriginals and the reporting of massacres, he, like others, was not beyond killing Aboriginals. He tells how, while shepherding, he was warned by his dog and fired into the long grass near to where the dog had been resting. He 'fired right into the middle of it, and immediately afterwards a black form bounded into the air and fell...He was not dead...the bullet had passed through just above the hips, so I shot him through the head'. - George Carrington, Colonial Adventures and Experiences, Bell and Daldy, London, 1871, p. 163.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 1, 209 n.1.