Bad behaviour in Queensland

Henry Reynolds is still writing books?   He must be getting on - it seems a couple of decades since he first gained a lot of attention for his aboriginal history work, and I thought he looked to be in his 50's or 60's even then.  (Let me check - yes, I'm right - he's 86.  Quite an age to be writing books.)

Anyway, he has a new book out Looking from the North which is given a generous review and summary at the Conversation.    Some extracts:

In the 19th century, land-taking by white colonising settlers (or, more accurately, “unsettlers”) came late to the tropics. They arrived from Melbourne, Sydney and Tasmania in the late 1850s, settling first, according to Reynolds, in the coastal port of Bowen in April 1861. But surely the first northern settlement began almost three years earlier with the proclamation of Rockhampton (later dubbed the township of “sin, sweat and sorrow” by British novelist Anthony Trollope) right on the Capricornian line in October 1858.

Still, both Rockhampton and Bowen have their origins painted in blood. Reynolds describes “ruthlessly usurping” pastoralists expanding rapidly across Aboriginal hinterlands, seizing traditional territories for vast “runs”, each of them between 65 and 250 square km.

The “reign of terror” this inflicted upon the various peoples of these “ancient homelands” was answered at most times, he writes, by armed, militant resistance from local Mobs. With guerrilla tactics and economic warfare upon white personnel, flocks and herds, they attempted to stem the vast, swelling tide of colonial advance.

Variously described at the time by participants as “a species of warfare”, “extermination” or, in omnibus fashion, “a war of extermination”, this acquisitive process was rigorously sustained by colonial legislatures packed with pastoralists and planters, guarding their economic interests. 

This elite phalanx was basically organising and funding its own violent land-theft, via the state-run Native Police services. Practitioners of British common law, in mostly impotent courts, helpfully averted their gaze from the inevitable slaughter.

Reynolds posits – and I would agree – that North Queensland saw the worst of this and then facilitated its spread across the “top end”. By this point, the killing power of Western ordnance had become increasingly acute, as belief in white racial superiority was also peaking.

Distant private colonists, remote from the southern administrative centre, became very much a law unto themselves. More than 70 Native Police camps covered North Queensland at various times, out of the known 150 or so that have been identified. These camps, conducting monthly patrols and many “dispersals”, were better weaponised, given a freer hand and often persisted far longer than their southern counterparts. 

Reynold's biggest claim to fame is, I think, to try to build "respect" for modern indigenous people by arguing that their 19th century predecessors didn't just passively accept the expanding takeover of land, but fought back in something like a modern, organised, guerrilla warfare type of way.   This has always seemed a bit of dubious exercise to me, and one prone to easy exaggeration; in much the same way that we get very dubious exercises in elevating some pretty basic stuff in indigenous fishing or plant knowledge to being equivalent to modern engineering or science.  (And see Dark Emu.)

Still, I can see value in making the aggressive nature of colonial expansion better understood.   I mean, it is always interesting to read about how colonial expansion tactics were being criticised by commentators at the time they were happening:

Queensland was increasingly seen by British colonial officials in Whitehall as “a rogue colony”, due to its enthusiasm for illegally “exterminating” Aboriginal people and extreme racial policies directed towards Melanesians and Asians.

One sees this clearly upon reading the disquieting reports written by travelling journalists venturing into tropical Australia for such southern publications as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Argus and The Age. As one correspondent noted in mid-1880, “the doctrine of extermination” was widely broadcast throughout the northern towns he visited. In general conversation, he “heard it repeated that the blacks must be exterminated and this is the sentiment of highly educated persons”.

North Queensland, too, is the key to understanding the subsequent frontier histories of the Northern Territory and much of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. For it was largely Queensland cattlemen, with their white and Aboriginal work-forces, as well as fervent gold-seekers from the Gulf Country, Cape York and north-western Queensland, who spearheaded the colonisation of these regions. They took their aggressive ideas, desires and suppressive techniques into new zones of conflict.

By the 1920s an original, pre-contact First Nations population of around 400,000 across the entire North (with perhaps 300,000 in Queensland) had been reduced by over 90% to around 40,000 people (with around 17,000 remaining in Queensland). These had been replaced by almost 500,000 migrant incomers. Yet most of the sequestered lands were now in the hands of only 1500 or so pastoral families, partnerships and absentee companies. 

 Yes, it is true that when I was in primary school, Australian history was all about famous explorers as heroes and the new lands they often opened up.   I should ask my kids, actually, if they ever had any lessons about explorers in primary school, but I suspect it is now completely absent.   (I do remember my daughter complaining that the positive lessons encouraging interest and knowledge of aboriginal life were pretty boring.)   

I've noticed that Tony Abbott is trying to rectify things with a reversion to Australia as the land of heroes (with the help of the IPA and therefore, probably, Gina Rinehart - who has never seen a bit of land she wouldn't like to dig up.)  There's a cynical review of his book at the Conversation too.

Despite my dislike of Abbott, I suppose I must grind my teeth and say I am at least sympathetic to his approach - that it's appropriate that both sides of the Australian experience be looked at.  Perhaps there needs to be an emphasis on those "liberals" who saw what was going on with treatment of aborigines at the time and tried to do something to stop its excesses?   That seems something well worth knowing.  

But teaching history from just one perspective does seem, well, less than optimal?