Frontier Massacres #

Cook’s Orders:

“to look for signs of occupation and negotiate with any natives they encountered”.

He was further ordered “to open dialogue and establish friendship”.

Thomas Morton, President of the Royal Society added:

“any natives you encounter are to be considered natural and legal possessors and no European nation has the right to occupy or settle among them without their consent.

Despite many hostile receptions, Cook ignored his express orders and before leaving the shores of New Holland, Cook declared it “terra nullus”, planted a British Flag on Possession Island.

John Clarke jested:

“In Australia the Indigenous population was said not to exist, but then hunted down because they did”.

End of the Picnic #

Francis Webb 1964

When that humble-headed elder, the sea, gave his wide
Strenuous arm to a blasphemy, hauling the girth
And the sail and the black yard
Of unknown Endeavour towards this holy beach,
Heaven would be watching. And the two men. And the earth,
Immaculate, illuminant, out of reach.

It must break-on sacred water this swindle of a wave.
Thick canvas flogged the sticks. Hell lay hove-to.
Heaven did not move.
Two men stood safe: even when the prying, peering
Longboat, the devil’s totem, cast off and grew,
No god shifted an inch to take a bearing.
It was Heaven-and-earth’s jolting out of them shook the men.

It was uninitiate scurf and bone that fled. (dandruff)
Cook’s column holds here.
Our ferry is homesick, whistling again and again;
But still I see how the myth of a daylight bled
Standing in ribbons, over our heads, for an hour.

We need constantly to be aware that literature can be a difficult pleasure. (Peter Craven)

Poetry is implicit not explicit. This poem is extremely elliptical, ambiguous but intriquing. It leaves a lot to the imagination – which is maybe the whole point. It is the power of the language that arrests our attention and tortures our curiosity.

Norman Lindsay fell out with Francis Webb, accusing him of deliberately writing obscure poetry. Webb’s reply was:

I’m writng the only way I know how; at least I’m honest.

Webb was highly influenced by Judith Wright, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Robert Lowell.

We can only make some sense of it by deconstructing its grammar.

The subject, the sea, bears the responsibility for allowing this blasphemy. The gods seem to have deserted or abandoned the natives. They flee and we are left with nothing but Cook’s column.

Webb writes anti-heroic, anti-celebration of empire poetry. Already he is aware of the national desolation caused by the painful reality of the blood and murder of original Australians. Though the language of “blasphemy and swindle” is strong, he maintains a level of control over his imagery and subject. A practising Catholic, he appears aware of abandonment.

The natives made it quite clear all they wanted is for the White people to be gone and leave them alone. Cook eventually decided to disobey his orders, by declaring the country “terra nullius” allowing him after three months of mapping the coast, planting a British Flag on Possession Island laying claim with his lie, to all of New Holland, renaming it New South Wales.

More @: https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/slessor/five-visions-of-captain-cook.html

Busts and statues of Cook abound – even by the French, however recently, several statues in honor of Cook have been defaced in protest. “Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead!” (Nietzsche ) Original inhabitants are demanding a bit of truth in memorialising our foundations.

Aboriginal version: #

January 26 marks the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson where Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack on the land of the Eora nation.

This was an invasion that had catastrophic consequences for all the peoples and nations who had lived there for tens of thousands of years.

What followed was brutal frontier violence and massacres, the forced removal of First Nations children from their families, indentured slave labour, and violent attempts to wipe out First Nations language and culture.

The fact that this violence and dispossession has not been formally acknowledged in over 200 years of contemporary Australia, whether through the history we teach, in the Constitution or failure to negotiate formal treaty/ies means that it is very difficult for many people to celebrate and that must be acknowledged.

Many Australians are either not aware of this history or, like our politicians, try to distract from the uncomfortable truths about our history and their contemporary consequences.

When the first ships of the first fleet arrived in Botany Bay, it was closely followed by the Gweagal clan, wondering why the huge clouds of ships with white people had returned. There were many indications that all they wanted is for the whites to leave. Phillip knew from Cook’s diary to be wary and conciliatory.

Arthur Phillips’s instructions attached to his commission from the Crown were clear:

“You are to endeavour by every means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them, and if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or to give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment”.

On January 22, 1788, a fishing net hauled in a large quantity of fish. The natives came by, made a large shout and took some of the fish as their privileged ownership. The English saw it as primitive pilferage. The next day, the natives came back, struck the fishermen with spears, and ran off with more fish as an assertion of native ownership.

There is no evidence that Phillip made any effort to establish a treaty with the natives to cede their lands with any offer of reciprocity.

Though he attempted to live in harmony with the indigenous people, his spearing at Manly Cove thwarted his best intentions.

Governor Macquarie #

Governor Macquarie’s egalitarian streak with its policy of tapping into the talents of expired convicts plus his extensive infrastructure projects created tensions. The newly minted landed gentry, supported by the colony’s senior military, church and judicial officers, denounced the governor for welcoming ex-convicts into polite society. Others queried why a colony of criminal degenerates needed so many expensive marble buildings, criticising his 265 public works as “extravagances” and “fugacious toys”.

Despite his liberal credentials, his Appin massacre was one of the earliest officially sanctioned mass killings of Indigenous people.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote in his diary in April 1816 that he felt compelled to “inflict terrible and exemplary punishments” upon Indigenous people living on the outskirts of Sydney. His diaries further records that three military detachments were deployed to clear the country entirely of “hostile natives”.

“In the event of the natives making the smallest show of resistance … the officers commanding the military parties have been authorised to fire on them to compel them to surrender; hanging up on trees the bodies of such natives as may be killed on such occasions, in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors,”.

The soldiers carried out the Governor’s orders with alacrity, with one group killing at least 14 Aboriginal men, women and children near the upper reaches of the Cataract River.

William Wentworth, in 1820, reflecting fallacious white views about the inferiority of Aboriginal people and lack of affinity with cultivation and domesticity, wrote:

“The aborigines of this country occupy the lowest place in the gradatory scale of the human species. They have neither houses nor clothing; they are entirely unacquainted with the arts of agriculture; and even the arms which the several tribes have … and the hunting and fishing implements with which they administer to their support, are of the rudest contrivance and workmanship.”

Myall Creek #

The most infamous Massacre remains the the one at Myall Creek, northwestern NSW. However this one received some Justice. The first most isolated reforming Judge, John Hubert Plunkett, an Irish Catholic prosecutor successfully brought the murderers of the 1838 Myall Creek massacre to justice despite the resistance and hostility of the media supporting the budding bunyip aristocracy of landowners.

The case established the principle that “the natives of the colony have equal rights with the people of European origin to the protection and assurance of the Law of England”. Mark Tedeschi

It too was “more honoured in the breach than the observance”

The memorial site, just out on the Delungra Road, marks the site of the massacre of 28 unarmed women, children and old men that occurred there on June 10, 1838. This is a place where terrible things occurred, a place shunned and avoided by locals, especially Aboriginal people, for over 150 years.

One could imagine that any memorial event here would be a sad and sombre affair. But while the ceremony inspires quiet reflection and deep sorrow, it also inspires a sense of hope, as we contemplate a future where reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is more than just a possibility.

It’s as if this place, with such a horrendous history, is being transformed by the people who year after year come to participate in a healing ritual. This transformation is what interests me as a researcher: how the rich ritual and recognition of our dark, shared history can heal both people and place.

Cultural Wars #

John Howard turned the condemnation of “black armband history” into a political calling card for a generation of conservatives, and together with his atempts to roll back Mabo, refusal for an apology and his cynical 2007 “intervention”, entrenched a culture of indifference towards Indigenous Australia. Enlightened people prefer a “black armband” to a “white blindfold”.

Professor Lyndall Ryan, #

leader of the University of Newcastle research team and Lorema Allam from Guardian Australia’s collaborative series uncovered at least 270 frontier massacres over 140 years as part of a state-sanctioned and organised attempt to eradicate Aboriginal people. It is likely more than twice the number.

Map: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php

One of the most spurious claims by European settlers was that the indigenous population did not make proper use of the land. This is convincingly disputed by Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and many other sources.

The Budj Bim #

central west Victoria.

Budj Bim is home to one of the world’s oldest aquaculture systems – a 6,600-year-old network of channels, dams and weirs developed by the Gunditjmara people to manipulate flood plains and water flows to trap and harvest kooyang (eels). It spans one hundred square kilometres on the site of the old Budj Bim lava flow in south-west Victoria, just north of the Great Ocean Road, about an hour’s drive from Warrnambool. It was nominated as a Cultural Landscape – a category of the World Heritage Convention that recognises combined works of nature and man.

Today, Budj Bim Cultural Landscape spans 9935 hectares and includes nine Gunditjmara-owned properties and a large section of Budj Bim National Park, which is cooperatively managed by Gunditjmara traditional owners and Parks Victoria.

The aquaculture systems are maintained by a team of Budj Bim rangers, who work in revegetation, feral animal control, weed control, and give tours to visitors.

The site is not only home to one of the world’s oldest and most complex aquaculture systems – it’s also the site of over 100 permanent stone dwellings. For thousands of years, dwellings such as these were home to a settled community of Gunditjmara people – a rarity in Aboriginal culture, which is mostly known to have been nomadic.

The reason Budj Bim’s aquaculture network – far more extensive than similar cultural sites in western Victoria and South Australia – was able to support a settled community was because of its once reliable water supply. But these days the demands placed on Australia’s waterways mean the site is unable to run at its full capacity.

With European settlement in the 1930’s came conflict. Gunditjmara fought for their land during the Eumeralla Wars which lasted more than 20 years. As the conflict drew to a close in the 1860s many Aboriginal people were displaced and the Victorian Government began to develop reserves to house them. Those who refused to move were placed in a Mission, closed in 1919. The lands were returned to the Gunditjmara in 1987.

David Marr #

The massacres near Maryborough Queensland in 1860.

We’re only human. We hang on to lies that comfort us. A big consoling lie that still hangs around this history of slaughter and dispossession is that we can’t apply the outlook of the 21st century to killings on the frontier.

Tell that to those who denounced the crimes as they were being committed. Theirs was real time rage. “It is a fitful war of extermination waged upon the blacks, something after the fashion which other settlers wage war upon noxious wild beasts,” wrote Carl Feilberg, editor of the Queenslander in 1880.

Forced to build their own pyres: dozens more Aboriginal massacres revealed in Killing Times research

“The savages, hunted from the places where they have been accustomed to find food, driven into barren ranges, shot like wild dogs at sight … ”

As war raged in the bush, a parallel campaign was fought in the newspapers of the country. Those outraged by the killings called on Christ more than we would these days. Their language was at times pompous and arch. They could be fiercely longwinded. But their verdict was absolutely 21st century: this was murder.

Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh led his native troopers on a killing spree in Maryborough in February 1860. In gratitude, the citizens of the town got up a fund to present him with a ceremonial sword inscribed with suitable words of thanks. The result was a newspaper war that ran for a year.

The presentation of the sword was condemned in the Maryborough Chronicle as:

“one of the most disgraceful acts ever perpetrated by any community, a blot so foul and deep-stained as will leave on this otherwise fair portion of God’s earth the brand of eternal infamy”.

The Moreton Bay Courier gave the details:

“Mr. Bligh … charged a camp near Mr. Melville’s, drove the poor creatures from it – some through the town, some into the river – and commenced butchering them forthwith. ‘Darkey,’ who had been constantly employed in the town – who could have been apprehended at any moment, had there been any desire, or occasion, was shot down opposite Mr, Palmer’s, where his body was left, and subsequently roasted.

“‘Young Snatchem’, an excellent and industrious black, was driven into the river, near the public wharf, – scores of men, women, and children stood by, and Lieut. John O’Connell Bligh stationed himself in the bow of a boat, which was in readiness, and forty or fifty shots were actually fired, five or six by Mr. Bligh himself. The boat overtook him (the black) in an exhausted state, and the ‘gallant hero’ – the deserver of a sword – lowered his carbine, and shot the defenceless, tired, unresisting wretch, in the back.”

I was up in Maryborough recently. It’s a town that commemorates everything about itself. Olympians’ names are set in the footpaths. Even old journalists like Margo Kingston and Quentin Dempster are honoured for being born in the town. Witty pedestrian lights celebrate PL Travers’s childhood years in Maryborough: GO is a green Mary Poppins in flight.

The new Anzac memorial in the park must have cost millions. A soundtrack of marching feet plays night and day. And in the museum down by the wharf is a fine memorial to the South Sea Islanders brought to cut cane in this stretch of Queensland. It reads:

“The grim trade was, in reality, little better than slavery.”

But the men Bligh killed are uncommemorated. Nor could I find a memorial anywhere in Maryborough to the dead – white and black – in the battles fought up and down the river in the early years of the town. I asked around. No one knew of anything. Too soon, perhaps.

The frontier massacres would be so much easier to face if we hadn’t realised back then what they meant. But we did

We don’t need plaques. Newspapers are evidence we knew exactly what was going on back then. The papers fought both sides of the war. The slaughters were denounced and defended. Writers urged pastoralists on to further acts of savagery. Others said: we must never forget that this is their land.

Few put their names to these opinions. In these furious exchanges they signed themselves “A Squatter” and “Bunya Bunya” and “Quelque Chose” and “Outis”. Scholars are still trying to untangle their identities.

The sweep of the rhetoric was imperial. In 1868 Freeman’s Journal compared the work of the native police with the destruction of the Aztecs and Incas.

“Those who have read English histories of the conquest of South America by the Spaniards must have been greatly edified by the indignant denunciations of the cruelties practiced upon the natives by the invaders.

“We have little doubt that we should surprise many of our readers, even among those who do not believe in Anglo-Saxon impeccability, if we were to plainly tell them that atrocities, fully as bad as were attributed to the Spaniards of two hundred years ago, are committed at the present day with the consent and approbation of an Australian Government.”

Also with an undeniable 21st century ring is the abuse of the defenders as pious and out of touch with reality. Between then and now only the language has changed. Virtue signalling would be the accusation today, followed by some pithy insults about inner city life and a taste for coffee.

The night the citizens of Maryborough met at the courthouse to offer him a sword, Bligh’s critics were denounced as “croakers”. The Moreton Bay Courier reported Mr Howard in full flight:

“Some of those gentlemen should have been in Maryborough as long as he had, should have heard, seen, and felt the merciless outrages the wretches, called by the croakers ‘the poor blacks’, had committed, and he had little hesitation in saying their tone would be changed.”

Newspaper reports of massacres in Queensland made their way around the world. In the winter of 1867, after the theft of tea and sugar from a store, the native police raided a camp on the edge of the Morinish goldfield. One of the miners wrote to the Rockhampton Bulletin. He didn’t need a century or so to work out what had happened here. He could see it with his own eyes.

The Pinjarra massacre: #

it’s time to speak the truth of this terrible slaughter.

“At the fire nearest to the Creek, which separates the camp from the township, and around which a number of blacks apparently had been sleeping, two pools of blood and brains showed where foul murder had been perpetrated, and a gin’s clothing, all stained with blood, was also found, exactly as if the unfortunate blacks had just left the articles on finding herself wounded.

*“A little further on, close to a fire, where one person, probably an old man, had passed the night, another puddle of blood and brains were found, and the surrounding ground bore all the traces of the flight of wounded men, and of dead bleeding bodies having been dragged over it.

The first body discovered was that of a black boy called Tommy … a well-known character in the district.*

“The poor fellow was found lying in a water hole with three wounds, one through the arm, another through the chest, and a third through the brain. The next corpse found was a little lubra, stiff and stark, concealed under a bush.”

Henry Reynolds reports the miner’s account landed on the desk of the secretary of state for the colonies in London who promised to draw the matter to the attention of Queensland’s governor.

Nothing much happened. The commander of the troopers that day was sacked – one of the few who met such a fate in the history of the native police. Bligh was untouched. He went on to command the force and ended up a magistrate in the town where he committed his very public murders.

The frontier massacres would be so much easier to face if we hadn’t realised back then what they meant. But we did. There were voices back then speaking in newspapers, in pulpits and in parliaments with great clarity, responding to the killings exactly as we would expect good people to respond today.

But those voices didn’t carry the day. The killings went on.

Judith Wright #

Judith Wright attempts to assuage some of our guilt in this poem:

Read by Chris Wallace Crabbe; 35:30

At Killula #

The blue crane fishing in Killula’s twilight
Has fished there longer than our centuries
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
and he will wear Their colors till he dies.

But I am a stranger come of a conquering people.
I can’t share his calm who watches lake being unloved by
All my eyes delight in and made uneasy for an old murder’s sake

Those dark-skinned people who once named Killula, Knew that no land is lost or won by wars
For earth is spirit.
The invader’s feet will tangle in nets there
And his blood be thinned by fears.

Riding at noon, ninety years ago, my grandfather
Was beckoned by a ghost, a black accoutered warrior
Armed for fighting who sank into a bare plain
And now it’s time past.

Quite short of sand, plumed reed and paperbark
Clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan.
I know we are justified only by love,
But oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.

And walking on clean sand,
among the prints of bird and animal,
I am challenged by a driftwood spear
Thrust from the water

And like my grandfather
Must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.

This is a powerful poem that speaks for itself, only appreciated in a holistic sense; the visceral, emotional and cerebral. To dissect the above poem, in the words of Susan Sontag would be to “usurp and desecrate” it.

Coming to terms with unentitled privilege is a widespread condition. The bible is conflicted. In Deuteronomy 24:16:

“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin”,

This is is contradicted by **Exodus 34:7

“who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Ceridwin Dovey #

The Past

Ceridwin Dovey exudes a cosmopolitan air with a modest unassuming demeanour demonstrated by this observation:

“We express ourselves to excavate our past to acknowledge and expiate our complicity with the randomness of life; to dispel wilful amnesia, to deal with or reckon with the secret guilt of our good fortune.”

We are always coming to terms with the past by animating the present, by constantly changing he narrative of history. Influenced by Freud’s theories of suppression, we need to cannabalise history, accounting for different wrong doing.

Dovey questions whether Americans are constitutionally bound to believe in clean slates, to worship the promised freedoms of the future rather than think too hard about the tyrannies of the past. (72)

In “The Gardens of the Fugitives” Dovey uses the analogy of archaeology to demonstrate that in excavating our past, we need to do it delicately, with scalpels and brushes, not mammoth earth moving equipment, so as to not destroy valuable evidence.

Dovey speculates on the lives of archaeologists; who are not so much interested in living people, rather in the dead, through the dry slow methods of piecing together the fragments of the past. Many appeared estranged from their own families. Perhaps we dig to fill the void. (97)

Educated in an South Africa primary school, High School in Australia, Universities in America and South Africa, studying Social Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies. Dovey made documentaries that highlighted the relationships between farmers and rural labourers in post-apartheid South Africa. Dovey returned to South Africa to study creative writing at the University of Cape Town. then did her graduate studies in Social Anthropology at New York University. She moved back to Sydney, Australia in 2010 spending five years working at UTS on sustainable futures, but her secret passion – what she calls her “guilty pleasure” is writing. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.

Ceridwin has Kitty say on the past:

“letting the past remain peculiar, rather than forcing it to become relatable. ..ancient people seem fathomless to us. Over the centuries the key to unlock the truth of how they lived has been lost…. Artefacts were more like pieces of alien matter dropped from outer space.” (149)

Her tutor challenged Kitty:

“not to get too worked up about our natural desire to connect with the humans of the past – was it not a good thing to look for common ground? Had we not learned by now the dangers of distancing other cultures….believing them to be less human?”

Kitty’s response:

“Relativism is essential for people who have to share time and space. We are all one, all essentially the same. Yet for people who do not have to share the earth in the same timeframe – relativism is not useful. It disrespects them and us and generations in between who have given their lives to change what humans are and can be, and how life is expected to be led. The more we uncover through excavating, the more we obscure.

One way of seeing can be mistaken for the only way of seeing. Freud said, ‘the stones speak!’ But they don’t. They keep a dignified silence. (151-52)

But while posterity has the right and even duty to judge the past, we must emphatically renounce the dangerous though often seductive belief in a collective guilt that descends through time to every present and future generation.

Dovey ponders the ethical legitimacy of using empathy as a tool of engaging our audience. Though her publisher demands she avoid the term “intellectual thriller”, we all want to our works to be readable and addictive. At the same time, we need to keep the imagination on a tight leash, as a tool of grounded understanding.

Because our knowledge is so limited, and cultural factors mean minds are ordered differently, most conclusions are based on conjecture, not certainty, calling into question their validity.

Beneficiaries #

History illustrates that social organisation consists of perpetrators, victims and beneficiaries. Which one of these we are, determines our perspective and motive. We may carry the moral burden of our ancestors; inter-generational trauma.

Examples include: beneficiaries of South African Apartheid, Turks and attempts of Armenian genocide, Germans and the holocaust, or Rwandans dealing with genocide.

All British Colonials owe a debt to displaced indigenous occupants. Evidence of vicarious trauma exists for not only our grandchildren, but those of the holocaust and Rwandans eager to volunteer for UN peace keeping forces. Intergeneration guilt and trauma takes a long time to heal.

Dovey considers her grandparents:

On my father’s side, poor working-class but without much sympathy for the plight of the poor blacks all around them; and on my mother’s side, educated gentle church going people who nonetheless did not lift a finger to oppose apartheid. (117)

As perpetrators or beneficiaries, we need to find the right words to heal the vicarious guilt and shame of our inherited past. Some become benefactors – Warren Buffet, Bill Gates….

Ceridwen Dovey distinguishes chronic guilt as “what we have done”, and chronic shame as “what we have benefited from”.

A young man is crossing a field. The elderly owner calls out:

“You’re trespassing on my land”.
Why is it your land?
My Grandfather fought the First Nation Peoples for it.
“I’m happy to fight you for it now”. Carl Sandburg

‘To feel shamed is to be made to feel unworthy of our peers, a feeling human will go to great lengths to avoid.

We write to become free of our cultural markers; not to be a prisoner of them. It can be a quest for atonement and belonging.

All art engages with culture, at least good art does. Dovey represents a writer grappling with growing up in a variety of cross cultures – South African, English, Australian, American; majoring in social anthropology across three continents, working briefly excavating in Pompei. This gives her global perspectives.