Frontier Genocide in Australia: The Hawkesbury River Conflict 1794-1805 in Perspective How did the invasion of the Australian mainland by the British government and the ensuing warfare between the European colonists and the Aboriginal Australians, particularly along the Hawkesbury River between 1794 and 1805, allow the violence to evolve into a frontier genocide?
By Catherine (Cat) Hall
Universiteit van Amsterdam/University of Amsterdam, Netherlands MA History: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2015-2018
Thesis Advisor: Johannes Houwink ten Cate Second Reader: Dr. Karel Berkhoff
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my thesis advisor Johannes Houwink ten Cate for his guidance while writing this thesis as well as my second reader, Karel Berkhoff. Without the feedback from my friends and classmates who reviewed my paper, Dan Smith, Jane Fineberg, Sarah Hilton and Danny Tatlow, this thesis would not be what it is. Finally, and most importantly, I could not have written this paper without the help of my best friend and first editor, Kirstie Wheeler. She
inspired me, toiled with me through my bouts of thesis-crisis, and her editing skills are beyond comparison. This thesis was both a joy and a curse to write, and I am thankful for everyone that saw this through with me to the end.
Abstract:
Although the British government did not intend to commit genocidal acts upon their arrival in mainland Australia, the conflict that occurred there between the Aboriginal Australians and the European colonists evolved into a frontier genocide. The genocide began the moment that the invaders decided to stay and continue colonization despite acknowledging that their presence was causing severe harm to the Aboriginal population and their way of life. As the invaders moved inland, they further disrupted Aboriginal foraging and violence between the Aborigines and the colonists escalated to the point that the and the colonists began to massacre the Aborigines in droves. Yet the British government rarely interceded when there was violence against Aborigines and the offending colonists were rarely punished. After conquering New South Wales, the colonists improved on their techniques and continued to massacre Aborigines as they began to settle in Victoria and Queensland. The warfare practically eliminated the Aboriginal population and the Australian government turned to the process of assimilation in order to ‘save’ the Aborigines. This process is considered to be cultural genocide and is currently the only event in Australian history that is widely recognized as genocide. However, the process of assimilation would not have been required if not for the frontier genocide in Australia, which as stated, almost caused the total demise of the Aboriginal Australians. This paper first explores the connection between the initial invasion of the colonists and the smallpox epidemic of 1789, which is argued to be an act of biological warfare and therefore not only a genocidal event within itself, but also the first genocidal period in Australian history. Secondly, this paper recognizes that the first three massacres at the Hawkesbury River in 1794, 1795, and 1805 signaled the beginning of the frontier genocide. Finally, this paper claims that the massacres at the Hawkesbury River, the British government’s response to the violence, and colonist actions throughout the frontier era were committed with the intent to destroy the Aborigines and their culture.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements and Abstract 2
Chapter 1 – Introduction 4
1.1 – The Aborigines and the Colonists 8
1.2 – The History ‘Wars’ 14
1.3 – Genocide on the Australian Frontier 26
Chapter 2 – Smallpox: Was it Biological Warfare? 32
2.1 – Theories of Dissemination 34
Chapter 3 – Genocide at the Hawkesbury 41
3.1 – The Hawkesbury River Conflict in Perspective 45
3.2 – The Hawkesbury River Settlement 49
3.3 – The Hawkesbury River Massacres 53
3.4 – Continuing Conflict along the Hawkesbury and Beyond________________________ 68 Chapter 4 – Conclusions 71
Chapter 5 – Bibliography 77
Keywords: Frontier warfare, frontier genocide, Australian Aborigines, Aboriginal Australians, Aboriginal history, Hawkesbury River, smallpox, biological warfare, history of genocide in Australia, Australian history, Australian frontier history, disease
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION
Prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the Aborigines of Australia were one of the few remaining unspoiled indigenous peoples. They existed as a peaceful civilization for
thousands of years until the arrival of the European colonists, which was a death sentence for the Aborigines, their culture, and the Aboriginal way of life. Not only did the European invaders steal land from the indigenous peoples and judge them as savages, but they also introduced the Aborigines to multiple foreign diseases that they were unable to resist. As the invaders began to settle more of Australia, they drove the Aborigines from their lands and took away their primary source of food and medicines. This is an act defined by Article 7(2)(b) of the Statute of the International Criminal Court as one of extermination, which “includes the intentional infliction of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population.”1 The extermination was almost completely successful, for by the mid 1800’s, the Aboriginal people were believed to be a doomed race that would not survive the turn of the century.
In recent years a debate has arisen pertaining to the frontier warfare between the colonists and the Aboriginal Australians in mainland Australia and whether or not the violence should be considered genocidal. Although the perpetrators of the frontier massacres could not be prosecuted today, it is important to explore and define genocide in this context in order to
establish patterns that can be seen throughout the history of genocides, which will aid further research and heighten recognition of genocidal events. Genocide is defined under Article 6 of the Rome Statute as:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
1 United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “Krstic Judgement, Part III. Legal Findings.” https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/krs-tj010802e-3.htm.
Whilst this paper considers the frontier genocide in Australia as a whole, it has been argued by Dirk Moses that
…many of the approximately 600 Indigenous cultural-linguistic groups regarded themselves as separate peoples…[and] adopting their self-understanding in terms of the UN definition can lead to the conclusion that each willed act of extermination by settlers and/or the state of an Aboriginal group could be regarded as genocide. In that case, many genocides took place in Australia, rather than being the site of a single genocidal event.2 One must prove that the perpetrators had the ‘intent’ to commit genocide and targeted a particular group to destroy ‘in whole or in part’ before an event can be considered genocide. The specific definition of ‘intent’ has been hotly debated in the international criminal court rooms. In order to argue that an event is a genocide, one must also prove that there was an intent to commit said genocide, and in the broader sense, genocide is not genocide unless there is a conviction by the court of law. “Genocide cannot be committed without a degree of planning and
preparation…. At trial, proof of the plan, or at the very least the logical inference that a plan exists drawn from the actual conduct of the crime, will inevitably be an important element in the prosecution case….”3 Without evidence of intent or a perpetrator’s compliance, proving
genocide and successful prosecution of the criminals is challenging. The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda concluded that
‘…by its nature, intent is not usually susceptible to direct proof. Only the accused himself has first-hand knowledge of his own mental state, and he is unlikely to testify to his own genocidal intent. Intent thus must usually be inferred.’4
In the case of frontier genocide in Australia, one must deduce intent from the orders, letters, and journals of the deceased colonists and ‘logically infer that a plan exists.’ However, it can also be said that “the place to look for genocidal intentions… is not in explicit, prior
statements of settlers or governments, but in the gradual evolution of European attitudes and policies as they were pushed in an exterminatory direction….”5 For the purposes of this study it will be made clear later that both the British government and the Australian administration gave 2 A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. (New York: Berghan Books, 2004), 19.
3 William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes.” 2nd Ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 267.
4 ibid., 264. [See also: Prosecutor v. Gacumbitsi (Case No. ICTR-2001-64-A) Judgement, 7 July 2006, para. 40. & Prosecutor v. Rutaganda (ICTR-96-3-A), Judgement, 26 May 2003, para. 525] 5 Jens Meierhenrich, Genocide: A Reader. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 109.
the settlers clear orders to remove the natives from any conquered territory, which gave way to extensive massacres of the Aborigines near the first settlements and eventually across the continent. Jacques Semelin has defined massacre as,
…not a spontaneous, irrational act of men (the perpetrators are most usually men) who cannot be held responsible for their actions. Rather it is a carefully planned act of revenge and that the conditions for massacre usually arise in places like a contested frontier where an invading group is trying to secure the homelands of the ‘other.’6
These massacres were undertaken not only in revenge for harms to the European colony and settlements, but also to eliminate any ‘troublesome’ natives and their clans in order to maintain ‘ownership’ of the land.
There is also a quantitative element to genocide because “the greater the number of victims, the more apparent the conclusion that the accused intended to destroy the group, in whole or in part.”7 Genocides in Tasmania and South America completely wiped out
civilizations, whilst others in Africa and Europe eliminated a majority of the targeted population. The genocide in Australia did not totally destroy the Aboriginal population and so it could be argued that it was not determinately genocide, however, during the Srebrenica trials at the International Criminal Tribune for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court determined “that genocide must involve the intent to destroy a ‘substantial’ part, although not necessarily a ‘very important part.’ In another judgement, the Tribunal referred to a ‘reasonably substantial’ number relative to the group as a whole.”8 The total population of Srebrenica was around 80,000 and of that, an estimated 7,000-8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed. Although 8,000 out of 80,000 may not be considered a ‘substantial’ amount of the population, it was a deliberate maneuver by the perpetrators to destroy the victim group because they were primarily of military age and would leave the remaining victims undefended. In Australia, the colonists did not destroy the entire Aboriginal population, but rather took over Aboriginal land and killed them in such numbers that their way of life was no longer sustainable. For instance, the Aborigines were nomads and traveled in small numbers, hence, if even a few members of their group were
6 Ryan Lyndall, “Untangling Aboriginal Resistance and the Settler Punitive Expedition: The Hawkesbury River Frontier in New South Wales, 1794–1810”, Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 2, (2013): 222, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2013.789206.
7 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 276-77. 8 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 279.
eliminated, the clan could no longer function properly and would be at a great disadvantage against the perpetrators.
A massacre involving… thirty to forty victims may be of relative importance if
considered as one incident in the continent-wide history of Aboriginal Australia. But…if viewed from…the perspective of the tribe or the local group, the killing of that many people might literally have meant its destruction…even if some members survived physically. The refugees… may not have been in a position to sustain their life group, maintain cultural traditions or bestow or receive appropriate marriage partners. And the death toll would also represent an irreplaceable loss of knowledge, skills and stories that were dependent on memory and oral tradition. Killing people in such circumstances would be analogous to burning books and destroying manuscripts, images, and shrines.9
In summary, this paper argues that the British government, the Australian
administration, and the ex-convict European colonists committed genocide during the frontier wars when they killed Aborigines in mass numbers, caused bodily and mental harm to
Aboriginal individuals, deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction. When the Aboriginal population was sufficiently depleted, forcibly transferred the remaining Aboriginal children into the custody of the Australian government.The Europeans may not have intended to pursue a genocidal campaign at the time of the initial invasion,
however, when the British government and the Australian administrations declined to punish the colonial perpetrators and encouraged the colonists to quell Aboriginal obstruction with whatever means available, they ensured future genocidal massacres. In addition, due to the fact that they had committed genocide before in pursuit of colonizing other indigenous groups, such as the Native Americans in the United States, they (and other European countries) were aware of the consequences of invasion and how their interference would impact the indigenous population. Shortly after the First Fleet arrived in Australia, an epidemic of smallpox broke out among the Aborigines, killing whole tribes and severely reducing the population. This is argued to be an act of biological warfare (and therefore genocidal) and will be explored in the first chapter of this paper. Secondly, this paper will argue that the British did not necessarily have genocidal intentions when they landed in Australia, but their decisions overtime eventually led to a genocidal campaign that ravaged the continent and destroyed Aboriginal culture. Although the campaign began the moment that the invaders stepped on shore, it did not truly commence until the first massacres of Aborigines by the colonists at the Hawkesbury River.
9 Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History. (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 2001), 21.
After the initial settlements were established near Sydney Cove at Richmond Hill and Port Jackson, the convicts began to colonize the banks of the Hawkesbury River. At the
Hawkesbury, the massacres allowed the colonists to maintain control over ‘their’ territory as well as the Aborigines and the administration continued to advocate immediate action against any Aborigines who interfered with the colony’s success. Most importantly, the British government did not stop their invasion even when it became clear that they were no longer welcome. The British were aware that they were decimating the Aboriginal population through disease, guns and dispersal and did nothing to assist them. Although there are several documented Government Orders ordering the settlers to avoid ‘wantonly firing upon the natives,’ these orders were not adhered to. Even when there were incidents that required a trial, such as when a settler
committed an assault or murder of an Aborigine or Aborigines, the majority of perpetrators went unpunished and were later released. Their reprieve meant that they were free to kill again with the knowledge that they would not be disciplined purely because the administrations both local and abroad could not agree on what actions to take against the perpetrators. The exemptions spoke to a pattern of inaction that was perpetuated throughout the rest of the colonization period, which will be made clear throughout the course of this study.
1.1 - The Aborigines and the Colonists
Language areas and bands of the Sydney Region.
[Peter Turbet, The Aborigines of the Sydney District Before 1788 (rev. ed.) (East Roseville: Kangaroo Press, 1989), 200.] (After Capell (1970), Tindale (1974) and Kohen (1993)).
Before this paper ventures to further explore the genocidal history of frontier Australia, a brief overview of the Aboriginal Australians and the European settlers is beneficial. Both groups had opposite approaches to agriculture as well as contrasting ideological and cultural mores. The Aboriginal peoples had inhabited their islands for at least 60,000 years before the invasion of the British in 1788. Their lives were simple as hunter-gatherers, but their ways were effective enough to sustain a population that has been estimated to be between 250,000 to 1,000,000 in total. The colonists were initially smaller in number but came armed with weapons and
philosophies that the Aborigines had never seen nor heard of. The Aborigines used stone tools and wooden spears, which were no match against guns and the other metal implements that the Europeans possessed. The British arrived in comparatively limited numbers and so firearms were essential tools, for before the Aborigines learned about the power of firearms, the loud noise was enough to terrify them. The settlers fired volleys above the Aborigines’ heads to intimidate them into running away rather than facing a fight with them head-on, which would have critically impacted the colonist population in the initial throes of invasion (chapters two and three further elaborate on the first years of settlement.)
As is common in the history of colonialism and genocides, the underlying motive in this case was occupation of the land, most easily accomplished by gaining control through the annihilation of the native population. In Australia, this was not difficult, as the Australian Aborigines were “nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, organized into bands, living in temporary shelter or huts, and still dependent on stone tools.”10 The Aborigines were aware that
maintaining a manageable population was crucial to their survival:
when local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better. Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in bad years.11
10 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999), 285.
The Aborigines also played a pivotal role in the formation of Australian landscape. 70% of Australia’s plants need or tolerate fire12 and their unique technique of ‘fire-stick farming’
shaped the land into the fertile estate the colonists were so enamored of, especially along the Hawkesbury River. Although the colonists initially realized that the Aborigines would burn grass to attract game, “not until the 1960s did researchers begin to sense system and purpose in
Aboriginal burning.”13 By using burn patterns the Aborigines created open spaces and fostered
new grass shoots14 that were perfect habitats for grazing animals, especially for kangaroo, their
meat of choice.15 The fires also enriched the land with minerals from the ashes of the burned
grass, which stimulated the growth of food plants, especially daisy yams, as well as improved their taste. 16 In addition, the scorching summer bushfires were contained because they were
deprived of fuel. 1718 The Aborigines were aware that each clan’s territory was “bounded by a
stream, mountain ridge, or headland,”19 although the colonists did not view this as a way of allocating property to an individual, which was an essential aspect in the determination of property rights (the concept of property rights will be explained later.)
Aboriginal religious beliefs revolved around their connection to the land, for “each family cared for its own ground, and knew not merely which species fire or no fire might affect, but which individual plant and animal, and their totem and Dreaming links.”20 One Aboriginal man has explained some elements of Dreaming:
Dreaming creatures were connected to special places and special roads or tracks or paths. In many places the great creatures changed themselves into sites where their spirits stayed…Aboriginals have a special connection with everything that is natural. Aboriginals see themselves as part of nature … All things on earth we see as part human.21
12 Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 1.
13 Ibid., 3.
14 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 297. 15 Gammage. The Biggest Estate on Earth, 1.
16 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. (Harrisonburg: R.R. Donnelley, 2007), 253.
17 ibid. 253.
18 Note: Bill Gammage further elaborates on this agricultural symbiosis in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. (2012).
19 Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton, Wayne Atkinson, James Boyce, RG Kimber, Steve Kinnane, Noel Loos, Bruce Pascoe. First Australians. (Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2010), 4.
The Aborigines did not only use fire to change the landscape, but also were capable of damming rivers and swamps and cutting channels through watersheds.22 They “...dropped trees
deliberately, by undermining their roots...”23 and Captain James Cook recorded that his party,
…saw some Trees that had been cut down by the Natives with some sort of a Blunt instrument, and several Trees that were barqued, the bark of which had been cut by the same instrument; in many of the Trees, especially the Palms, were cut steps of about 3 or 4 feet asunder for the conveniency of Climbing them.24
Although the Aboriginal lifestyle was considered primitive and backwards to the British colonists, Jared Diamond, researcher and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, has argued that
Aboriginal societies in recent millennia appear to have been evolving on a trajectory that would eventually have led to indigenous food production. They had already built winter villages. They had begun to manage their environment intensively for fish production by building fish traps, nets, and even long canals. Had Europeans not colonized Australia in 1788 and aborted that independent trajectory, Aboriginal Australians might within a few thousand years have become food producers, tending ponds of domesticated fish and growing domesticated Australian yams and small-seeded grass.25
Yet this would not be so, for the European invasion of Australia changed the projected future of the Aboriginal peoples.
Australia is unique because it was essentially untainted by foreigners until the arrival of the colonists in 1788; for reference, this was twelve years after the Declaration of Independence was signed in the United States. The British had conducted invasions in Africa, North America, Asia, Central America, and South America before landing in Australia and were practiced at dominating and eliminating the indigenous peoples. Although “the British rarely pursued extermination, [they] frequently foresaw it.”26 Altogether, of all of the countries that Britain colonized, Australia could be considered the most ‘successful’ operation. The British stole an entire continent from the indigenous peoples and made it ‘theirs’ with little fuss and in a relatively short period of time. Australia is a subjugated, westernized culture that rarely causes 21 Survival International. “Aboriginal People” Survival International. (2017).
https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/aboriginals 22 Gammage. The Biggest Estate on Earth, 3.
23 Ibid, 11.
24 E-books Adalaide “Captain Cook’s Journal, Chapter 8: Exploration of East Coast of Australia” (April 1770) ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cook/james/c77j/chapter8.html. 25 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel,149.
foreign concerns and has been found to be rich in natural metals and minerals with sizeable gas and coal reserves. Yet Australia’s success is due to all of the thousands of Aboriginal deaths through massacres, disease, and settler violence. “A pioneer of Aboriginal studies, Charles Rowley, attributed to the British ‘an innocence of the consequences, with an unacknowledged wish to be rid of the whole matter as cheaply and with as little fuss as possible.’”27 Be that as it may, the British government was aware of the potential consequences of invasion and how relations with the indigenous peoples would impact a new settlement. In the case of Australia, they succeeded in establishing an economically sufficient colony, but they did so by spilling blood of the indigenous peoples to such an extent that it was believed that they would not survive the next century.
The settlements in North America and Australia were used as penal colonies in order to control the criminal population that had accumulated in Britain. In early 18th century England,
stories of highwaymen and ‘daring’ criminals had come to be admired by the general public, so much so that their stories were circulated in pamphlets and newspapers around the country. At that time, it was of no consequence whether an individual had been convicted of a heinous crime such as rape and/or murder or if they had committed a minor offence such as poaching or petty thievery - almost all convictions led to the death penalty (or at the very least, they suffered punishments such as branding or public humiliation.) 28 Executions had long been a source of public entertainment, despite the fact that they were meant to be “elaborate and shocking”29 and
“designed to act as a deterrent to those who watched.”30 Yet executions, particularly the
high-profile cases, were attended by hundreds of people. For example, 200,000 people attended the execution of an infamous street robber, Jack Sheppard, who was hanged in 1724 after making four escapes from prison.31 Yet crime rates continued to rise and in the early 1750s, the
government established the first permanent, professional police force in London, the Bow Street
27 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 250.
28 Matthew White, “Crime and Punishment in Georgian Britain.” British Library. (4 Oct 2009) https://www.bl.uk/georgian-britain/articles/crime-and-punishment-in-georgian-britain.
29 ibid, “Crime and Punishment in Georgian Britain.” 30 ibid, “Crime and Punishment in Georgian Britain.” 31 Ibid, “Crime and Punishment in Georgian Britain.”
Runners. However, their formation “meant a huge rise, not in gross crime, but in successful arrests and convictions.”32
From as early as 1717, the British government had been sending convicts across the sea to North America to serve out their sentences in hard labor rather than facing the execution block in England. However, once the United States won their independence from Britain, the
Americans no longer allowed the British government to ship convicts there and it soon became clear that an alternative was needed. Australia, an ‘empty continent’ halfway across the world, was not wholly unknown to the Europeans. The Dutch had landed in Australia in 1606, followed by a host of other Spanish, French, and British explorers throughout the 17th century. However, it was not until 1770 that terra Australis was declared the property of Great Britain. Captain James Cook sailed around the South Pacific and scouted the coasts of Eastern Australia, finally
christening the entirety to be ‘New South Wales.’ The first colony was established near Port Jackson upon the return of Cook, who was accompanied by the First Fleet of convict settlers in 1788.
The criminals transported to Australia were convicted of crimes similar to those tried today: forgery, theft, rape, and murder, among others. The more extreme cases, such as rape and murder, were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, now commonly known as Tasmania. (One must consider that there may be a correlation between the quick demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the fact that the convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land were those who had committed the most heinous crimes.) The other convicts settled on the mainland near what is now Sydney, New South Wales. One historian, Keith Windschuttle, has claimed that the Christian nature of the convicts would have kept them from committing such vile acts in Australia, however, many of the convicts were sentenced to be transported precisely because they were criminals who had committed vile acts within Britain. In fact, historian Stuart Banner contends that if “Australia had not been a penal colony, the first British settlers might have been scattered missionaries and whalers, who would have been less able than the government to seize Aboriginal land by force.”33
32 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. (London: Vintage, Random House, 2003), 160.
33 Stuart Banner, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia.” American Society for Legal History, Inc. Law and History Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 95-131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30042845, 111.
Some of the convicts relished the opportunity to make a new start in a foreign land and appreciated the Aboriginal lifestyle, for example, “the Eora’s hunting, fishing and fighting must have seemed exciting and enjoyable compared to work at the brickyards or the quarries, or the backbreaking labor of clearing and hoeing ground on the public farms.”34 However, there were
many others whom, “…damaged by social conditions at home and the convict system in the colony, vented their frustrations and aggressions on Aboriginal people.”35 Others sought to abandon the confines of the prison colony by escaping into the wild, yet the escapees often succumbed to starvation or were attacked by the indigenous peoples. Finding fertile ground for crops and livestock took much longer than they had anticipated and eventually, hunger made the convicts “…stupid and some crazy, playing havoc with morale and producing endless displays of petty tyranny.”36 The conflict with the indigenous peoples continued, leading the colonists to take
more radical actions to protect themselves and the newly formed colony. Although the British government had some control over the initial convict settlements, like those at Port Jackson and Parramatta, the settlements located further away from the administrative capital, like the farms along the Hawkesbury River, saw little government oversight. In the end, the conflicts near the Hawkesbury became more violent and complicated than those closer to the harbor because there was more land to be conquered, and therefore, more Aborigines to resist colonization.
1.2 – The History ‘Wars’
The case study of this thesis concentrates on the Hawkesbury River massacres in 1794, 1795, and 1805, however, before exploring the genocidal history of frontier Australia, one must analyze the first events that were studied in this context: The Black Wars in Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania) and the assimilation era, whose victims have been called the ‘Stolen Generation.’ Before the 1970’s, Australian national identity had been interwoven with the belief that the settlement of Australia was a peaceful and progressive journey. Little attention was given to the Aborigines and their role in the country’s formation besides believing that the
34 Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010., 359.
35 Richard Broome, Australian Aborigines: A History Since 1788. 4th Edition. (Crows Nest,
NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 21. 36 Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 96.
Aborigines were, in the eyes of the Western world, in need of civilization and eventually became grateful for Western intervention. At that time,
historians reflected common racist and ethnocentric attitudes. There was a wish to deliberately avoid and underplay the question of racial violence and the role played by governments in the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and measures taken to continue to control their lives, such as relocation to reserves and missions, and the removal of children.37
The public was unaware of the role that their colonial ancestors had played in the degradation of the Aborigines, nor was there recognition of their modern accomplishments, such as their participation in World War I and the fact that 300 Aboriginal men served amiably in the 1st Australian Imperial Force.38 “In the past, as a general rule, indigenous Australians’ cultural beliefs and practices were not respected, and insufficient regard was paid to their traditional knowledge and resource management practices.”39 In Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney, author Paul Irish described his academic experience with Aboriginal history in the 1980’s.
Like most Sydneysiders, I grew up with this belief of Aboriginal absence. The only time local Aboriginal people featured in my schooling… was in a brief cameo in relation to the First Fleet – something about Bennelong, Manly, spearings and smallpox. Then it was all Macquarie, convicts, goldrushes and harbor bridges.40
W.E.H Stanner was one of the first scholars to confront the lack of attention paid to the Aborigines’ role in Australia’s past in his 1968 Boyer Lecture “The Great Australian Silence.” What may have well begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.41
The ‘Silence’ became a focal point in Australian history because it sparked a revival of research, particularly in the 1970s and 80s, exploring why Australian history had ignored the suffering of 37 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Addressing the Key Issues for Reconciliation, 35. 38 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Addressing the Key Issues for Reconciliation, 35. 39 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Addressing the Key Issues for Reconciliation, 23. 40 Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney. (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017), 3.
41 Ann Curthoys, “WEH Stanner and the Historians”, (Hinkson & Becket Sample Chapter 15, 233-238), aboriginalstudiespress.com, accessed June 22, 2018.
https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/products/book/an-appreciation-of-difference-sample.pdf., 233.
the Aborigines after the invasion. Stanner’s recognition of the ‘Silence’ put a spotlight on the lack of a treaty (treaties) between the Aboriginal tribes and the Australian government as well as the abuse of the Aborigines during the frontier era and inspired the publication of dozens of books by academics, historians, and authors over the following decades. As historians brought to light the atrocities that marked the invasion of Australia and the dispossession of Aboriginal land, they changed the way in which Australians perceive the history of British invasion by overturning the pre-existing notions of the Aboriginal and convict livelihoods.
The idea that the colonists were, in fact, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Aborigines was contradictory to everything colonial descendants had been taught – they did not think of themselves as invaders, but as saviors. Due to the reluctance of the Australian
government to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights, a treaty between the Aborigines and the Australian government was strongly rejected within the non-indigenous community. However, “supporters of the Aboriginal cause appreciated that the land was the fundamental cause of racial conflict, that the central issue in seeking to improve race relations was some recognition of Aboriginal land rights.” 42 In 1979, a small group formed the Aboriginal Treaty Committee with the intention of championing the idea amongst their peers43 by producing a series of pro-treaty
pamphlets and circulating treaty agreement information. They made little progress, however, and decided to disband in 1983 when the Senate Standing Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs rejected the idea of an Aboriginal treaty in their report “Two Hundred Years Later,” which upheld the notion that “the Aboriginal peoples were not a sovereign entity and so could not enter into a treaty with the Commonwealth.”44 This was a major blow to the Aboriginal
cause, but activists continued to plead the Aboriginal case and five years later, at the January 1988 bicentenary of the First Fleet, the official celebrations were countered by Aboriginal protesters who declared it ‘a year of mourning.’45 For the Aborigines, the ‘holiday’ celebration 42 Henry Reynolds, Aboriginal Land Rights in Colonial Australia. (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1988), 11.
43 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) “Aboriginal Treaty Committee” (2014)
aiatsis.gov.au/collections/collections-online/digitised-collections/treaty/aboriginal-treaty-committee.
44 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. “Documents of Reconciliation: terra nullius and sovereignty”. Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. accessed June 2, 2017.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/orgs/car/docrec/policy/brief/terran.htm.
45 Patrick Brantlinger, “Review: ‘Black Armband’ versus ‘White Blindfold” History in
Australia.” Victorian Studies 46, no. 4. (Summer 2004): 655-74. www.jstor.org/stable/3829922, 656.
was no celebration at all. The British invasion caused death, suffering, poverty, and more, all of which had desecrated their ancestors and in turn, the future Aboriginal generations. This day is now known as Australia Day (January 26) and still harbors many of the same sentiments for the Aboriginal people.
The lack of a treaty had not been seriously addressed since the “Two Hundred Years Later” report, but the public reaction at the bicentenary catapulted the issue back into the limelight and paved the way for the 1992 Mabo v Queensland case, which was put forward by the Meriam people of the Murray Islands on the Torres Strait.46 The ruling set a historical precedent when the High Court ruled “that Australia was not terra nullius or ‘land belonging to no one’ when European settlement occurred there and that the Meriam people were 'entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of (most of) the lands of the Murray Islands.'”47 (The concept of terra nullius is further explained in section 1.3.)The win
was a crucial step in the land rights movement and had strong support from the Labour Prime Minister at the time, Paul Keating, (1991-1996) who was a strong advocate for Aboriginal rights and encouraged the public to acknowledge the bloody history between the European settlers and the indigenous peoples in Australia. (In fact, his legislative response to Mabo v Queensland would make the landmark case a major part of his legacy.)48 Historians Bain Attwood and SG Foster explain that Keating “saw native title legislation as an act by which the Australian state could ‘recognize and make amends for past wrongs’ and begin a process that could ‘transcend the history of dispossession.’”49
The year 1993, shortly after the Mabo decision was ruled upon, was declared by the United Nations General Assembly to be the ‘International Year for the World’s Indigenous People,’ and Keating, in one of his most famous speeches,50 asked the Australian people to empathize with the Aborigines’ plight and circumstance.
46 Note: the Torres Strait Islanders are the Aboriginal peoples who lived on the islands near Queensland and have their own distinct history and cultural traditions, as do the other indigenous peoples and tribes referred to in this study.
47The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) “Mabo
Case,” accessed December 13, 2017. https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/mabo-case.
48 Bryan Keon-Cohen QC, Mabo in the Courts: Islander Tradition to Native Title: A Memoir. Vol. 1. (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd., 2011), 587.
49 Bain Attwood, and SG Foster. Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience. (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 13.
50 Brian Carroll, Australia’s Prime Ministers: From Barton to Howard. 2nd Ed. (Dural Delivery
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble expectations, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.51
Keating’s greatest victory was the passing of the Native Title Act in December 1993, which granted the right of land possession to Australian Aborigines if conditions were met, for example, the tribes were required to practice their traditional customs as well as prove a direct ‘connection’ to the area by those customs.52 Although the Native Title Act recognized further land rights for Aborigines, the treaty issue stalled. Towards the end of Keating’s term in 1995, the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee declared once again that “the major distinguishing characteristic of a treaty is that it is concluded between sovereign nation states with full international personality. Individuals, or groups without international personality, cannot be parties to a treaty.”53 A new government, the Liberal-National coalition led by Prime
Minister John Howard, was elected in 1996. Howard’s views were more conservative than that of Keating’s, stating in his 1996 Sir Robert Menzie Lecture that “the attempted re-writing of Australian political history over recent years by our political opponents should not be countered by an equally politicized re-writing to redress the balance….”54 He echoed the views of noted historian Geoffrey Blainey, who, in his 1993 Latham Lecture, coined the term ‘black armband’ history. Blainey argued that “while the nation’s historiography had once suffered from an overly
51 Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR). “Transcript: Redfern Speech – delivered in Redfern Park by Prime Minister Paul Keating, December 10, 1992” ANTaR. (August 29, 2017) accessed December 2, 2017.
https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf.
52 National Native Title Tribunal. “Native Title: An Overview”. National Native Title Tribunal, ©Commonwealth of Australia. (Aug 2010), accessed December 22, 2017.
http://www.nntt.gov.au/Information%20Publications/Native%20Title%20an%20overview.pdf. 53 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. “Documents of Reconciliation: terra nullius and sovereignty,” https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/orgs/car/docrec/policy/brief/terran.htm.
54Australian Government, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. “Address by the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP, the 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federation. 18 November 1996. PM Transcripts: Transcripts from the Prime Minister,” accessed December 22, 2017.
celebratory or ‘three cheers’ view of the past, in recent years that had been pushed aside by an apologetic and equally biased successor – the ‘black armband’ view.”55
As previously stated, Australia’s colonist descendants believed that their settlement of the continent was one of a peaceful coexistence with the indigenous population as well as an
incredible achievement to be proud of, known as a ‘three cheers’ view of history. However, with the rise of new research and revelations, some have argued that Australians had turned this proud history into one to be ashamed of, a ‘black armband’ view of history portraying every action by the British as brutal and evil and bemoaned the fact that their country was built upon the
innocent deaths of thousands. The invaders had done nothing to be proud of; amongst their many crimes, they forced the Aborigines to leave their homelands, left them to starve, intentionally spread deadly diseases, raped them, abused them, and enslaved them. Historians began to estimate Aboriginal deaths in the tens of thousands rather than mere hundreds. Yet genocide is not the sole characteristic of Australian history. Howard argued that Australians were, “right to be proud of the economic achievements of our past… to be proud of having built one of the most prosperous, most egalitarian and fairest societies in the world….”56 Howard further reasoned that Australian history should never be a source of smug delusions or comfortable superiority, nor should it be a basis for obsessive and consuming national guilt and shame…57 I
believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than of which we should be ashamed.58
Howard and Keating’s participation in what became dubbed the ‘History Wars’ further politicized the debate and controversy. Admitting that the convicts were not the first inhabitants of Australia and that the Australian Aborigines were the primary ‘owners’ continued to be an uncomfortable notion for some of the Australian population. Use of the word ‘genocide’ to describe the colonization of Australia was even more so and it was not until the Department of Aboriginal Affairs published Peter Read’s paper in 1981 that ‘genocide’ was used in an official context. Appropriately entitled “The Stolen Generations,” Read argued that
55 Paul Ashton and Anna Clark. Australian History Now. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd., 2013), 156-157.
56Australian Government, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. “Address by the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP, the 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture”, 10.
57 ibid., 11. 58 ibid., 9.
genocide does not simply mean the extermination of people by violence but may include any means at all. At the height of the policy of separating Aboriginal people from their parents the Aborigines Welfare Board meant to do just that. The 1921 Report of the Board stated that, ‘the continuation of this policy of dissociating the children from camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem…. ‘The Aboriginal problem’ meant Aboriginal people who could not, or chose not to, live as white people wanted them to do.59
Almost a decade later, Read pioneered the 1995-97 “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,” also known as the “Bringing Them Home” report. This report further investigated the claim that the Australian government had forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their parents between the 1880s-1969 (officially.) The Inquiry acknowledged that the genocide definition, as stated in Article II of Genocide Convention, included the forcible removal of children in subsection (e) and stated that
when a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was the primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.60 In the end, the government committed cultural genocide by depriving Aboriginal parents of the opportunity to teach their children about Aboriginal spiritual beliefs, their tribal languages, and other aspects of their ancient civilization. Indeed, many Stolen Generation children do not know who their parents are or their given names. This makes tracing their lineage almost
impossible, although this has improved with recent DNA testing techniques and the evolution of social connections on the internet. Australia has continued to make reparations for the
Aborigines effected by the assimilation and the government has taken further steps to educate the public, but nonetheless, “the most unsettling aspect of this historical revolution… is that settler Australians have had ‘to come to terms with a past in which they were neither heroes nor victims, but rather agents of a colonizing… process that destroyed the lives of many people.”61
59 Read, Peter. “The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales, 1883-1969.” New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs. accessed December 19, 2017. daa.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Reading-7_StolenGenerations.pdf.
60 Human Rights.gov. “Bringing Them Home Report: The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,” accessed December 19, 2017.
https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_ho me_report.pdf.
Some of the more prominent historians that have addressed the history of genocide in Australia are Henry Reynolds, Dirk Moses, Geoffrey Blainey, Lyndall Ryan, and Richard Broome, all of whom have
represented colonization as a matter of invasion, depicted the frontier as a line between conflicting parties, regarded the conflict as war, treated the Aborigines’ response to resistance, and explained the violence of frontiersmen in terms of racism as well as other factors.62
The first event during the frontier era of Australia that was recognized as genocidal was the Black War (1820’s-mid 30s) in Tasmania, which “has often been viewed as the first and perhaps the only case of the complete extermination of an aboriginal population in the history of the British empire.”63 Indeed, a majority of historians have determined that the British committed genocidal acts in order to dominate the island for themselves and were responsible for the extinction of the Tasmanian people. For example, in Raphael Lemkin’s paper “Tasmania,” he wrote that “…once open warfare between black and white had begun, the government was powerless to persuade them to live in peaceful proximity and was forced to resort to the drastic measures which led to the eventual extermination of the race.”64 Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have similarly argued that the Black War was a genocide conducted by the British government in order to exterminate the indigenous population. Reynold’s book The Other Side
of the Frontier (1981) lent a new perspective to Aboriginal-convict relations as “the first major work to try and interpret the frontier from an Aboriginal point of view (as well as to cast Aborigines as historical subjects or agents….)”65 Reynolds’ focus is on the Aboriginal-settler relationship and the circumstances in which the violence arose.66 The Aborigines were people, just as the convicts were, with their own unique lifestyle and customs. In Reynolds’ eyes,
the Aboriginal response to invasion was much more positive, creative and complex than generations of white Australians have been taught to believe… All over the continent Aborigines bled as profusely and died as bravely as white soldiers in Australia’s twentieth century wars.67
62 ibid., 4.
63 Brantlinger, Review: ‘Black Armband’ versus ‘White Blindfold” History in Australia”, 662 64 Raphael Lemkin, “Tasmania” ed. Ann Curthoys. Colonialism and Genocide ed. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (Oxon: Taylor & Francis Group Ltd., 2007), 82.
65 Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, 171.
66 Henry Reynolds. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd, 2006), 9
In the second edition of her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996), Ryan argued that increasing pastoralism and conflict with the Aborigines over land ownership led Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1824-1836) to undertake further steps to claim Van Diemen’s Land for Britain’s purposes. By the 1840’s, the pastoral settlers had resorted to ‘search and destroy
operations’ so that they were not under government influence nor were their actions publicized in the media.68 The remaining Tasmanians were deported to the neighboring Flinders Island where they could be ‘civilized.’ From thereon, they were a doomed race, for “when any group of Aborigines looked like regenerating and becoming an effective political group, their children were removed and the young men banished.”69 Ryan has contended that “there was… a kind of pride in having achieved the extermination of a whole race – a kind of first for white Australians seeking a place in the world.”70 Nevertheless, she claims that the settler violence and
dispossession that took place on Van Diemen’s Land was
…relatively peaceful in comparison with the dispossession and extermination of the Aborigines in western Victoria, western New South Wales, and most of Queensland. Tasmania never experienced the levels of poisoning, trappings, ambushes, and massacres that occurred in other parts of Australia.71
Another historian who specializes in the Aboriginal Australians, Richard Broome, has tread more cautiously in his analysis of the conflict on Van Diemen’s Land as well as the massacres on the mainland. Although he has admitted that the colonists were certainly
responsible for the Aborigines’ demise, he has also contended that the assaults were instigated by both sides and that there was “a war for the land was in progress for which the Aboriginal owners were considered ‘open enemies.’”72 Indeed, he warns that historians should be cautions when using the word ‘massacre’ “…for its overuse labels Aboriginal people as passive victims awaiting slaughter.”73 However, he does not dispute the fact that the Stolen Generation was genocidal and names Auber Neville and Cecil Cook as the individuals who “made it a systematic, racially directed policy in an attempt to erase Aboriginality and make Australia
68 ibid., 5. 69 ibid., 5. 70 ibid., 3. 71 ibid., 3.
72 Richard Broome. Australian Aborigines: A History Since 1788, 44. 73 ibid., 45.
white….[and] acted out of misguided humanitarian reasons – to make Australia white and to save those of mixed descent from their ‘primitive’ backgrounds.”74
Keith Windschuttle is at the furthest end of the denialist spectrum. Windschuttle has argued that many historians have ‘fabricated history’ and invented facts to suit their needs. He has published several books that have divided the historian community: The Fabrication
of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), The White Australia Policy (2004) and, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume Three: The Stolen
Generations 1881–2008 (2009.) Windschuttle is infamous for his controversial views and the majority of them have been refuted by reputable historians. Windschuttle touted his Volume One as “the most exhaustive analysis yet undertaken of relations between the settlers and
Aborigines”75 in which he “concludes that, despite its infamous reputation, Van Diemen’s Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it. Nor did the limited conflict that occurred ever deserve the name ‘warfare.’”76 Some of his reasoning is based on his assumptions about the colonists, for instance, his impression of the colonists was that most of them
were Christians to whom the killing of the innocent would have been abhorrent. But even those whose consciences would not have been troubled knew it was against the law to murder human beings, Aborigines included, and the ultimate penalty was execution.77
In addition, Windschuttle has argued that European deaths can be attributed to the Aborigine’s lack of “cultural sanctions against the murder of anyone outside their immediate clan”78 and
claimed that they killed the British “simply because they could.”79 Furthermore, he wrote that
as far as we can tell…the Aborigines did not have the kind of attitude to the land that would lead them to wage sustained warfare in its defense. If they had had strong
territorial instincts, the Aborigines would have displayed them in the first twenty years of British colonization…. Excluded from the labor force and having no way except begging of legally acquiring… highly desirable luxury products, tribal Aborigines chose to plunder them from the huts and homesteads of settlers instead, and to kill any whites they found in their way. The actions of the Aborigines were not noble: they never rose beyond robbery, assault and murder.” 80
74 ibid., 200.
75 Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002).
76 ibid.
77 ibid., 360. 78 ibid., 129-130. 79 ibid., 129-130. 80 ibid., 130.
Windschuttle’s bias and fabrications inspired Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s
Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2003.) Whitewash is comprised of eighteen essays by various
historians and academics that analyze and critique Windschuttle’s Volume One, pointing out the numerous factual flaws and fabrications as well as commentary regarding his inept writing style. Ryan has written several rebuttals to Windschuttle’s attacks on her person and also recently introduced an online digital map of the massacres of Aborigines in Australia, “Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872” (released July 2017), which took four years of preparation to launch. Windschuttle’s work, as well as his editing of the ultra-conservative journal The Quadrant, has inspired ‘White Australia’ supporters and given them a supposedly factual basis for their arguments. He holds strong support from the newspaper The Australian (a newspaper similar to the far-right Breitbart News Network in the United States) which once published a 7,000-word personal attack on a prominent Australian academic, Robert Manne, after Manne accused Windschuttle of plagiarizing from Robert Edgerton, an American anthropologist.81 Windschuttle’s work, Bain Attwood claims,
…is a form of denialism. Academic historians should not engage with such work.
Debating deniers in print, on radio and television, in debates, in schools or anywhere else, provides them with a forum, an audience and a legitimacy they would not otherwise have.82
Despite that, it is important to note that his claims are embellished and false when
compared to the multitudes of other research and concisions by other reputable historians. Those who have written about genocide in Australia mainly focus on the extermination of the
Tasmanian Aborigines and the era of assimilation. Historians such as Lyndall Ryan, A. Dirk Moses, Richard Broome, George Blainey, however, continue to bring attention and perspective to the frontier massacres that took place on mainland Australia in addition to exploring pre-invasion Aboriginal history. Ryan’s new digital massacre map and further physical discoveries of Aboriginal presence before the invasion will lend further perspectives in the future as students and professionals alike examine the new data and draw new conclusions.
81 Robert Manne, Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003), 11.
82 Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History. (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 4.
Over the years, the national discourse of how Australian history should be interpreted and what history teachers should teach has further become politicized and contested as multitudes of parties, organizations, and individuals “present their particular version of the national story.”83 Historians have constantly been embroiled in a dispute regarding their interpretations of history and as the public became more involved, the more they were divided, so much so that the conversations came to be construed as a ‘war.’ Geoffrey Blainey has rightly recognized that
the word ‘war’ is mistaken. Controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to come. It is in the nature of history and of most intellectual activities, and the more so in a nation where the main strands of history – Aboriginal and European – are utterly different.84 Here, he is correct. People can agree to disagree, or attempt to reconcile oneself with an
opposing view, but many are steadfast in their beliefs, no matter how illogical they may become. Each story is different and as the debate sours, the more these individual groups attach
themselves to their particular version of the story and attempt to convince others (by any means necessary) that their ‘version of the truth’ is correct. The truth has been seen as black and white and right or wrong and this has been problematic for historians as the premise of historical research is to remain impartial and unbiased. However, this has not always been possible as history has often been skewed by those in power. Ultimately, the further politics invade the telling of these stories, the more biased and irrational they can become, which has caused a rift within the academic community: “…one unfortunate effect of ‘seeing historians at war’ has been the erosion of public belief in historians’ ability to tell the truth, casting them instead ‘in this partisan image of federal politics, cultural warriors peddling rival versions of the truth.’”85
Whilst the genocide of the Tasmanians and the assimilation era were the first periods to be recognized as genocidal, research into those periods brought the frontier warfare into
perspective. Numerous historians, authors and intellectuals have contributed their opinions on the subject of genocide and genocidal intentions in Australia and in the present day, their discoveries have made Aboriginal history “become central to national discourse and debate,
83 Ashton and Clark, Australian History Now, 14.
84 Geoffrey Blainey, “I can see parts of our history with fresh eyes” The Australian, February 21, 2015. accessed May 26, 2017.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national- affairs/indigenous/geoffrey...history-with-fresh-eyes/news-story/dfbd5d36d5faf1000ec337cc0b87d9bb., 3.
particularly in the context of national reconciliation….”86 However, ‘white blindfold’ historians such as Windschuttle and politicians such as John Howard only add to the degradation of historical facts when they ignore issues affecting Aboriginal people today that arose from their past dispossession, mistreatment, and continuous refusal to recognize Aboriginal land rights. The ‘history war’ will continue to pervade Australia even as further constructive analysis is
undertaken concerning the genocidal aspects of Australian history during the frontier warfare and the assimilation era.
1.3 - Genocide on the Australian Frontier
Did the British government and the European colonists intend to eliminate the Aborigines of mainland Australia upon their arrival? On the contrary - they had expected to form some semblance of a relationship with the natives and perhaps even live in a peaceful coexistence (whilst also using the natives as laborers as they had in the past.) Some authors, such as Richard Broome, argue that because they did not intend to eliminate the population upon first arrival, it cannot be classified as genocide. However,
once it was known that Indigenous people lived in the interior, wanted the settlers to leave, and died in great numbers wherever the settlers went to such an extent that their survival seemed unlikely, then the decision to continue the colonizing process has a genocidal component to it.87
This initial non-action by the British government - not leaving when it became clear that the Aboriginal people wanted them to leave - set them on a genocidal path. Despite being unwelcome, they stayed and then proceeded to claim the territory as their own. When the Aborigines resisted or tried to take their share, the British began to intentionally massacre the Aborigines in droves. As stated, these massacres were so widespread that it was believed and accepted that the Aboriginal population was close to extinction.
86 Bain and Foster. Frontier Conflict, 11.
87 Australian Humanities Review. “Interview: ‘Genocide and Colonialism’: In conversation with Lorenzo Veracini, Ann Curthoys and John Docker discuss some of the issues at stake for
Australian Aboriginal history in current international debates about the definitions of genocide.” Australian Humanities Review. (September 2002)
In order to claim terra Australis, the Europeans had to justify the invasion and assert their dominance over the Aborigines and the land. Their first defense for their claim to the land was based on the Lockean views of property, particularly his philosophy concerning terra nullius, meaning ‘land belonging to no one’ or land that is ‘unoccupied or uninhabited for legal
purposes.’ Locke concluded that due to the fact that every man ‘owns himself,’ “the labor of his body and the work of his hands…are strictly his. So, when he mixes his labor with [the land] … he makes it his property.”88 The belief in terra nullius helped to rationalize the British landgrab because they claimed that the Aborigines did not work the land and therefore could not ‘own’ it. Indeed, when the Aborigines began appropriating European crops for themselves, it was initially interpreted as ignorance of European property laws that would be amended when they educated the natives.
Another way in which the Europeans validated their actions was the belief in a ‘state of nature.’ All humans began in a ‘state of nature’ during which man lived simply, for instance, as a hunter-gatherer society like the Aborigines. Overtime, humans evolved from that state of nature into a society with social organization, civilization, and laws, among other attributes.89 Most importantly, one of the ways in which humans showed progress was by assigning property rights to individuals. The Europeans did not observe this behavior within the Aboriginal population nor discerned any clear territorial boundaries set by the Aborigines. The colonists did not begin to interact with large groups of Aborigines until they reached the interior and this lent to the idea that there were limited inhabitants in Australia and therefore, the land was ‘empty.’ Yet later, there were several records of lands being passed down through Aboriginal generations, for instance, Bennelong90 claimed that he inherited an island near Sydney Cove from his father that was to be passed on to his closest friend upon his death.91 Nevertheless the Aborigines were not recognized in courts and having no way to contest the landgrab, terra nullius persisted
88 John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government”. ed. Nathan Bennet. (2017), accessed June 6, 2018. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1689a.pdf., 11.
89 Stuart Banner, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia”, 109.
90 Note: Bennelong was the first Aborigine captured by Governor Phillips. The British taught him English and Western ways, even taking him to meet the king in England, so that he could serve as interpreter and spokesperson for the Aborigines.
throughout colonization. Indeed, disputing terra nullius has been one of the bases of court battles, such as the aforementioned trial Mabo vs Queensland.
Although the Europeans did not initially plan to exterminate the native population, their decision to stay and continue expanding their settlements despite acknowledging that they were causing the demise of an entire people constitutes genocide. Michael Mann’s explanation of the ‘four stages of colonization’ will provide a framework for the progression of frontier genocide in Australia. According to Mann:
plan A typically envisions a carefully planned solution in terms of either compromise or straightforward repression. Plan B is a more radically repressive adaptation to the failure of Plan A, more hastily conceived amid rising violence and some political
destabilization.92 Murderous cleansing typically emerges as a kind of Plan C, developed only after the first two responses to a perceived ethnic threat fail.93 If the ‘threat’ remains, they will proceed with more radical plans D, E, however many until they have fulfilled their ultimate goals.94
In Australia, plan A was to establish a colony that would benefit from native labor. This was obstructed in two ways: first, after convicts were released, they were granted land to widen their prospects agriculturally and economically, which eliminated the need for indigenous labor. Secondly, and most importantly in the eyes of the British, the Aborigines did not ‘work the land’ as the Europeans did. The Aborigines were nomads who rarely staying in one place for long, had no domestication techniques, and were unaccustomed to the agricultural labor the colonists demanded. Indeed, their perception that the Aborigines did not work the land supported their claim of terra nullius. “This enabled the settlers to convince themselves that they had a legal and moral right to the land because Australia had never actually become the property of the resident Aborigines.”95
Once it was understood that there was no hope of acquiring an Aboriginal workforce, the colonists resorted to Plan B. They decided that the best way to rid themselves of the ‘Aboriginal problem’ was to ‘disperse’ the natives by forcing them away from the settlement, thus
solidifying their dominance over the land. The Aborigines were a traditional hunter-gatherer 92 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7.
93 ibid., 7. 94 ibid., 79-82.
95 Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 67.
