Rowland, M.J., Myths and non-myths. Frontier ‘Massacres’ in Australian history-The Woppaburra of the Keppel Islands. (original) (raw)
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The Massacre at Mowla Bluff, the Kimberley,
The little-known Mowla Bluff Aboriginal massacre, led by Western Australian police at Mowla Buff pastoral station on the Kimberley, was barely a century ago in 1916, around fifteen years after Federation, what Sir Henry Parkes called ‘a great national government for all Australians’. ‘All’, except for Aboriginal people who continued to be persecuted. There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute. It was not the first massacre in the Kimberley; they began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism. More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system. So, this is the story of Mowla Bluff, with all its racist violence and self-deception, the myth of settler sovereignty and pastoral supremacy, a story for our times, should we listen, where leading political figures of the day, people such as John Forrest, the ‘father’ of Western Australia, drove Aboriginal injustice because they could, because pastoralism and economic development carried more weight than imposed Aboriginal suffering. Today, we don’t kill with Lemkinian menace, but we do persecute, with Aboriginal deaths in custody, high per capita rates of incarceration, and disparities in health, education, and housing. We confront our future, hobbled by our past. Unless we change. Unless our values change. Unless we recognize that authority does not confer legitimacy. We should not deny our history of a violent pastoral frontier as it swept across the continent, following militarised invasion beachheads, seeking supremacy, suppressing opposition, killing, subjugating, predating. We conclude that telling the truth of the past is the way to reconciliation, to move from denial to acknowledgment, from trauma to healing. The future is now us.
A Brief Introduction to the Massacre at Mowla Bluff, the Kimberley,
We examine the circumstances of the little-known Mowla Bluff Aboriginal massacre, led by Western Australian police at Mowla Bluff pastoral station in the Kimberley. It involved a criminal cover-up that extended to the highest reaches of Perth society, including the Police Commissioner. The massacre took place in 1916, barely a century ago, around fifteen years after Federation, what Sir Henry Parkes called ‘a great national government for all Australians’. ‘All’, except for Aboriginal people who continued to be persecuted. No one was charged. There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute. It was not the first massacre in Kimberley, and it would not be the last. The killings began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism and greed. More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system. We consider the question, was the Mowla Bluff massacre an instance of Lemkinian extermination throughout the Kimberley, what we now call crimes against humanity under the 1998 Rome Statute? We conclude, yes.
The Question of Colonial Genocide in Australia The Question of Colonial Genocide in Australia
We reexamine the fraught question of colonial genocide in Australia and conclude that the worst of Australia's values were formed in the crucible of racism, a sense of superiority deriving from Britain's class obsessed hierarchy, a sense that has now transferred to the environment, for which specism is the enabler and ecocide is the consequence. The impact of British power on Aboriginals was calibrated and ruthless, but we are now asked to question British 'intent', that there was no documented intention by Britain to commit genocide. This is a further example of 'reframing'. Mass killing almost never has a written order. It is unlikely, and highly self-incriminating, that a Government would issue instructions for carrying out deliberate murder. Nevertheless, ethnically targeted mass killing-racial destruction-is usually the expected result of some official policy or reactive social behaviour within a policy context. We are asked by some politicians and historians to absolve or reject Britain's role in colonial genocide because there is no evidence of written orders from the British Government that authorises mass killing. Others argue, if mistakes were made, that the past should remain in the past. We are further asked by some (such as Windschuttle and other denialists) to dismiss any allegations of mass killing because there is no body of legal evidence (that is, case histories) to support such a charge. Instead, we are exhorted to consider violence against Aboriginals, if we accept it at all, as the aberrational excesses of a few settlers at the lawless frontier; or if we reluctantly accept that targeted racial violence and Aboriginal antipathy did occur, we are encouraged to play it down as 'a black armband' view of history that is unhelpful in the myths we prefer to create for ourselves.
The partial Case for Australian Genocide: the massacre at Murdering Creek
Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. The massacre was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost.
This article addresses the vexed question of settler massacres of Aboriginal Victorians on the Port Phillip frontier 1836Á1851. It argues for a new approach to the question by combining the models of Aboriginal resistance and settler activism within a framework that considers colonialism as a dynamic, contested and ongoing process. It then applies the methods of massacre investigation devised by historical sociologist Jacques Semelin to analyse a range of printed sources from the period to identify the scale, pre-conditions, types, prevalence and evidence of settler massacres across the three major pastoral regions in Port Phillip. In analysing the data, the article finds that settler massacres were widespread and responsible for the deaths of more than 11 per cent of the known Aboriginal population in Port Phillip in 1836. The data also identifies three pre-conditions and four types of massacre and that most were perpetrated by settlers but that the various mounted police units also played a key role. The article concludes that settler massacres have played a more significant role in the dramatic Aboriginal population decline in Port Phillip than historians of the Aboriginal resistance school have estimated.
Could the Massacre of Indigenous Australians in the Colonial Frontier Wars be Considered Genocide
Genocide is undeniably a heinous crime in a category of its own, which no superlative can embellish, involving systematic murder on an industrial scale. It is so despicable as to be assigned its own monstrous niche writ large on history's wall of inequities. Its non-identical twins, crimes-against-Humanity and barbarity are more obvious blemishes and arguably more comprehensible to modern Australians. The documented massacres of original Australians is a blurred image when seen through the haze of stolen generations, forced adoptions and toxic altruism. This paper will serve as a literary trial, the prosecution demanding a finding of guilty as charged but the defence protesting that genocide was not perpetrated during the Australian frontier wars; mass killings yes, but genocide no.
Deconstructing colonial myths: the massacre at Murdering Creek
Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek in south-east Queensland. Myth is the handmaiden of reality, a more onerous citizenship. It can be ignored. Or cast aside as quaint folklore from another time. Or it can be explored and possibly verified or refuted. What cannot be discounted: myth forms a large part of the Australian historical landscape. For over a century, Australia was a war zone. It was a war for land and Aboriginals were in the way. A firestorm of massacres defined the pastoral frontier as it advanced across the continent. Many of these massacres have achieved the element of myth, untested, insufficiently examined. One of them is the reported massacre at Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. This paper proposes investigative tools that can help decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide. We remind ourselves that racism is the belief that one race considers itself superior to another. Perhaps history is not so far removed after all.
Echoes of Aboriginal History: Exposing Genocide in Australia
2012
The implications of the European colonization of Australia, beginning in 1788, have affected nearly all socio-cultural patterns of Indigenous peoples’ lives. The colonial governments’ efforts at the westernization of Aboriginal groups yielded devastating consequences, including, inter alia, legal discrimination against and physical mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Although several Australian historians and anthropologists had sought to equate these practices to the acts of genocide in the past (Evans, 1988; Reynolds, 1981) it was not until the mid-1990s when the discourse of Aboriginal genocide started to gain momentum and elicit public interest.
Deconstructing Australian genocide How Britain shaped the destruction of Aboriginal society
Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?