Rowland, M.J., Myths and non-myths. Frontier ‘Massacres’ in Australian history-The Woppaburra of the Keppel Islands. (original) (raw)
2003
Believing that the violence of the colonisation of Australia has been overstated, Keith Windschuttle has published a series of critiques of the writings of historians and of museum displays. In December 2001, the National Museum of Australia hosted a discussion of Windschuttle's interrogation of the 'frontier violence' story. The revised papers of that occasion comprise this book. Windschuttle is sometimes labelled a 'denialist' d la David Irving. Whatever similarities there may be between these two authors, the rhetorical effect of that label is to place Windschuttle outside the conversations of humanists. (At the National Museum forum, at least one speaker was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I've experienced in academic life.) I write this review in resistance to that ostracising tendency. As I read Windschuttle, he has made two points that must be debated in the usual scholarly ways: that the evidence for some emblematic 'massacres' is weak; and that the colonists' violence against Indigenous Australians was the expression, in difficult circumstances, of the rule of law. Five of the 15 substantive chapters (by Jan Critchett, Ray Evans, Deborah Bird Rose, Geoffrey Bolton, Ann Curthoys) do not cite Windschuttle or address explicitly his arguments. Critchett and Evans give valuable summaries of research documenting extensive violence in (respectively) western Victoria in the 1840s and Queensland from c.1824 to the First World War. Common to both theatres was an Aboriginal corps of mounted police, the 'singularly most destructive institution' (p.73) of Queensland's frontiers, in Evans' view. The most focused critique of Windschuttle comes from Lyndall Ryan who examines his debunking of the well accepted story that British soldiers inflicted a 'massacre' on
Myth and reality in Australian colonial history and beyond
Much of Australian history is in the form of ‘myth’. The absence of case law makes the investigation of massacres more difficult. Many university history faculties discourage such conflict studies as unnecessarily negative, preferring to focus on ‘race relations’. The debate gave rise to the ‘history wars’ and a repudiation of the ‘black armband view’ of history. This paper contends that a culture of denialism has perpetuated some of the dysfunctional behaviours that drove violent Aboriginal depopulation.There is evidence that Australia is in a late stage Lemkinian genocidal process.
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.
When Massacre Appears: Representations of Australian Indigenous massacres in fiction
R Massacres that have occurred in the past are still present in the form of historical record, oral history and most popularly in film and novels. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which knowledge of past massacres are transmitted in fictional form, through novels and films. It looks at two particular examples of scenes of past massacres of Indigenous Australians as they appear in the international award-winning novel Secret River by Kate Grenville and the internationally acclaimed feature film Tracker directed by Rolf de Heer. 1 The novel is set in the early Australian colonial period near the settlement of Sydney, and the film is set in Central Australia at the end of the colonial period. In this way the two texts span the period of overt Australian colonization between 1788 and 1930, in which most massacres of Indigenous Austral-ians occurred. The texts are used in support of the argument that how we write historical massacre matters, whether it be in fictional or non-fictional form. Not only must we write of massacre as an event that sits within a recognizable and possible past but as an event that is accountable to the 'miracle of survival' that is ongoing Indigenous presence and cultural practice. At the same time writing on massacre should continue to evoke the ineffable experience of those who suffered within that massacre which cannot be entirely written or wholly known but the attempt to make that suffering known still must be continually made.