Forgotten War

By Henry Reynolds

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Henry Reynolds
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74223-392-5

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1 A distressing moment,
2 But was it warfare?,
3 What kind of warfare?,
4 The cost of war,
5 What was at stake?,
6 Two very different wars,
7 One history or two?,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

A distressing moment

It was a distressing moment in the short history of Van Diemen’s Land. In the middle of September 1831 the newspapers in Hobart and Launceston reported the details of what they called a ‘most appalling affair’. The first news was that a prominent settler, Captain Bartholomew Boyle Thomas, and his manager, James Parker, were missing from their property Northdown on the north-west fringe of the settled districts. After several days of painful suspense the dreadful news broke. They had been killed by the Aborigines. ‘All doubts are now removed …’ declared the Launceston Advertiser. ‘They have been murdered, barbarously murdered by the inhuman savages.’ The paper drew a harsh lesson:

Thus two more respectable and highly-respected individuals have been added to the list of those who have fallen victims to the barbarity of a race which no kindness can soften, and which nothing short of utter annihilation can subdue.

The deaths deeply affected the settler community. It was a year since many of the men had participated in the Black Line, which had attempted to clear the hostile Aboriginal bands from the settled districts. The approach of spring held promise of renewed conflict, which it seemed nothing could subdue. Thomas was well known and admired. He had served in the British Army for ten years during the Napoleonic Wars and had fought with Bolivar in South America. He was known as one of the settlers who sought to develop friendly relations with the local Aboriginal bands. The Launceston Independent declared that the whole colony called aloud for retribution ‘deep and lasting not only upon the perpetrators of the deeds should they come within our power, but upon the whole race …’

There were two distinctive features of the affair. The first was that the settlers did not appreciate at the time that Aboriginal resistance was at an end. Thomas and Parker were the last two victims of almost 250 killed. The other unusual feature of the situation was that the three Aborigines responsible for the killing were captured and taken to Launceston. A hurriedly assembled coroner’s jury was able to clearly establish their guilt. The question then was what would be done with them. Intense debate within the Launceston community led a settler to write one of the most important public documents about the relations between Aborigines and settlers to have appeared in the Australian colonies during the whole of the 19th century. The ‘Correspondent’ who signed himself ‘J.E.’ began by declaring that his feelings prompted him to wish the ‘extermination of the Blacks’ but after more mature reflection on the subject some ‘solemn questions’ presented themselves. ‘Are these unhappy creatures’, he wondered:

the subjects of our king, in a state of rebellion? or are they an injured people, whom we have invaded and with whom we are at war? Are they within the reach of our laws; or are they to be judged by the law of nations? Are they to be viewed in the light of murderers, or as prisoners of war? Have they been guilty of any crime under the laws of nations which is punishable by death, or have they only been carrying on a war in their way? Are they British subjects at all, or a foreign enemy who has never yet been subdued, and which resists our usurped authority and dominion? [original emphases]

Many profound questions were thrown open by the Correspondent’s speculation, and there were no easy or comforting answers. Before all else was the question of warfare. How that was answered shaped everything else. He had no doubt about it and simply declared:

We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies – as invaders – as their oppressors and persecutors – they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore are they not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful possessions, which have been torn from them by force.

The Correspondent reminded his readers of contemporary attitudes to prisoners of war, who were not normally put to death for acts committed ‘in the field of battle’. But he demanded even more, calling for understanding and compassion:

What we call their crime is what in a white man we should call patriotism. Where is the man amongst ourselves who would not resist an invading enemy; who would not avenge the murder of his parents, the ill-usage of his wife and daughters, and the spoliation of all his earthly goods by a foreign enemy, if he had an opportunity? He who would not do so would be scouted, execrated, nay executed as a coward and a traitor; while he who did would be immortalized as a patriot. Why then shall we deny the same feelings to the Blacks? How can we condemn as a crime in these savages what we would esteem as a virtue in ourselves? Why punish a black man with death for doing that which a white man would be executed for not doing?

Given the situation at the time they were highly provocative thoughts. We have little knowledge of how they were received in the community. A correspondent calling himself ‘Tom Tough’ wrote a short critical response but that seemed to be the end of the public controversy. The three imprisoned Aborigines were not brought to trial but sent into exile like all their surviving contemporaries to the islands in Bass Strait. That is, they were treated as prisoners of war and not as common criminals, as the Correspondent had advocated.

So the immediate matter of how to treat the killers of Thomas and Parker was answered decisively and expeditiously. But the more general questions did not go away. They remained highly relevant during the rest of the century as the conflict seen in Tasmania was recapitulated right across the continent. And the key issue at the centre of the Correspondent’s letter remains as potent now as it was 180 years ago. Was there a war between invading settlers and Aborigines that lasted from the beginning of settlement to the early 20th century? If so, what does it mean for the way we interpret the whole national experience? Is there, even now, a general acceptance of Aboriginal resistance as a legitimate defence of their property and sovereignty? Can we see the warriors as patriots? Are we able to treat them with the same respect we accord the servicemen and -women who died in overseas wars? Will we ever seek to immortalise them as we do the war dead? Or do we fall short of the understanding and compassion embodied in that still challenging letter of September 1831?

While many of the Correspondent’s contemporaries may have disagreed with his views, few were unaware of the violence that had raged through Tasmania’s rugged hills and narrow valleys for the previous five years. And as settlers moved relentlessly into Aboriginal territory district by district until the end of the 19th century, there was a recurrent awareness of attendant conflict.

The documentary evidence left behind all over Australia is various and voluminous. Colonial politicians delivered speeches about frontier conflict. They took sides either supporting or condemning the ever-present violence and the massive retaliation by frontiersmen and police. But on neither side of the argument was there any doubt about the violence itself. The only vital question was whether it was necessary and justified. The colonial newspapers carried extensive reports of speared settlers and retaliatory punishment. Correspondents contributed letters calling for sympathy either for the beleaguered pioneers or the dispossessed blacks and sometimes for both. The famous inland explorers – Mitchell, Sturt, Eyre, Leichhardt and Grey – referred to frontier conflict in their letters and published journals, and as we will see in chapter 2 visitors to the colonies remarked on the prevalence of violence, the harsh racial attitudes and the ubiquitous guns. They were characteristics that distinguished life at the Antipodes, adding to its exotic nature.

By the end of the century many of the original pioneers had published memoirs in books and newspaper articles. Conflict with the Aborigines was a common theme, and enhanced stories of heroic endeavour and triumph over varied adversity. The colonial historians placed frontier conflict in the mainstream of their narratives. Pioneer ethnographers who talked to the Aboriginal survivors of the killing times found that memories of loss and destruction lived vividly on and were widely shared with surviving kin. Many observers thought what was unfolding on the vast frontiers was a form of warfare. They said so many times over. Other commentators did not talk of war. It was a matter of personal choice. But there seems not to have been any public debate about how appropriate the term was when applied to Australian history. It was a less controversial matter at the end of the 19th century than it became a hundred years later.

The strong presence of the Aborigines in colonial literature was not sustained into the 20th century. The common belief was that they were members of a dying race whose fate was sealed. The iron laws of evolution had predetermined their fate and there was little anyone could do about it. The new white Australia had no place for a resurgent Indigenous population. The federal government only became involved in relevant policymaking with the assumption of authority over the Northern Territory in 1911. In the states, Aborigines were increasingly confined to closed reserves and missions or to camps on remote pastoral stations. With the end of armed resistance it was easy to forget the true extent of frontier conflict.

And the new nation needed a fitting story. Settlement purged of the violence could provide stirring accounts of explorer endurance and pioneer grit. The frontier became a site of struggle with the land, not a fight for possession of it. The national narrative became one of a hard and heroic fight against nature itself rather than one of ruthless spoliation and dispossession. The squatter and the bushman became national heroes, sharing many attributes but appealing to different sections of the community. No one wanted to notice the blood on their hands.

Historians of the first half of the 20th century paid less and less attention to the Aborigines and in some books they disappeared altogether. Much of the violence went with them. It became possible to celebrate the ‘peaceful’ nature of Australian settlement and to write about the ‘quiet continent’. The 19th-century understanding about war was left behind. The frontier became geographic or economic rather than political and martial. The settlers, in this new-scrubbed version, had pushed out into a legal and political vacuum. In his much-celebrated book Australia of 1930, WK Hancock caught the mood of the time when he observed that for six generations Australians ‘swarmed inland from the sea, pressing forward to their economic frontiers, which are the only frontiers Australia knows’. In a similar vein, the novelist Arthur Adams created a character in his novel The Australians who declared:

The only frontier that the Australians have ever contemplated was the sea: and, a thinly scattered people over an immense space of empty land, the Australians felt intensely the instinct of possession, and regarded every square mile of this vast tract as his personal property.

The vigour of Aboriginal resistance was forgotten. Inability and acquiescence took its place. Tribesmen and -women were pitied rather than respected. They were, Hancock declared, ‘pathetically helpless’ when confronted by the settlers. From time to time his contemporaries remembered them and shed ‘over their predestined passing an economical tear’. In his history of Australia Edward Jenks observed that the Aborigines dragged out ‘a precarious and wretched existence’ and ‘could offer no resistance to the invaders’. This became a common view: either from inability or inclination, the Aborigines were never able to contest the control of the continent. In this they supposedly lacked the capacity to resist displayed by Indigenous people in other parts of the world. The distinguished anthropologist Raymond Firth declared that the Aborigine acted in a simpler manner to invasion than does the Maori or the Melanesian: ‘he mutely dies’.

During the 1920s and 1930s it was often argued that Australia had a uniquely peaceful history and had never experienced war within its boundaries. It was an assessment with the authoritative support of the official war historian CEW Bean, who declared that war ‘never had happened’ in Australia.

These two appealing ideas of a peaceful history and accommodating Aborigines had a long life. When he was writing his influential book The Australian Legend, published in 1958, Russel Ward focused attention on the life of pastoral workers ‘up the country’ in rural New South Wales in the first half of the 19th century. He saw them as men who, in responding to a unique environment, gave birth to attitudes and values that came to be seen as uniquely Australian. But Ward said nothing about the relations between the stockmen and the Aborigines – neither conflict nor accommodation. In a general history published eight years later, he argued that Australia had a uniquely peaceful history because of the mild Aborigines, whose reaction to settler hostility was ‘so sporadic and ineffectual that men seldom had to go armed on the Australian frontier’. Clearly Australians had forgotten many things that had been well known to their pioneering grandparents. At almost any time in the 19th century it would have been thought strange to talk about mild Aborigines and peaceful settlement. The arena of conflict had moved as settlers pushed progressively into what they liked to term new country. Skirmishing was endlessly repeated throughout the 19th century. But the reason it slipped from national awareness was that the Aborigines themselves were relegated to a very minor role in national history. They might engage the professional interest of anthropologists and inspire painters and poets, but there seemed to be no productive place for them in a national story of economic development and political progress, and everyone knew that, while war was important, Australians went away to the other side of the world to engage in it.

The general histories that appeared in unprecedented numbers in the 1950s and 1960s gave varying amounts of attention to the Aborigines. They often began the story with the arrival of the First Fleet and dealt with the better known events of the early colonial period, like Arthur Phillip’s relationship with Bennelong, the war in Tasmania and the Black Line, and even the massacre at Myall Creek in 1838 and the following trial and execution of the stockmen. But the attention was characteristically episodic, with no suggestion that relations between settlers and Indigenous nations were a central theme in the nation’s history.

At times the Aborigines disappeared from view altogether. Australia: A Social and Political History, edited by Gordon Greenwood, professor of politics and history at the University of Queensland, was probably the most widely used general history during the 1950s and 1960s. It had semi-official status, as it had been commissioned to mark the fifty years of Federation. Greenwood chose his collaborators well, and it was in many ways an admirable collection. But it contained no discussion at all of the Aborigines. They were mentioned twice in passing but did not even merit an entry in the index. None of the prominent historians who reviewed the book noticed or were troubled by the omission. In 1959 the leading historian Professor John La Nauze addressed a meeting of his colleagues and surveyed the historical work of the previous thirty years. Lack of interest in the Indigenous people was one of the most striking characteristics of national historiography, he observed, because Australia was unique among settler societies, in having ‘no real experience of formidable opposition by the native inhabitants’. Feeble resistance, he implied, resulted in deep disinterest and mild condescension. Unlike the Maori, the American Indian or the South African Bantu, La Nauze declared, ‘the Australian aboriginal is noticed in our history only in a melancholy anthropological footnote’.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Forgotten War by Henry Reynolds. Copyright © 2013 Henry Reynolds. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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