Dear Joe,

http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ojs/index.php/aa/article/viewFile/393/423

You can also Google "Mapping the Massacres of Queensland
Aboriginal Society." It's an article in The Australian
newspaper.

contd ...

See you on another discussion.
For me this one has run its course.

Dearest Foxy,

Thank you for that article. I was immediately struck by this sentence: "In Australia, however, relatively little research attention has been paid to the archaeology of Aboriginal/European interaction and almost none at all to the archaeology of frontier conflict .... "

Not very promising :( If it's true, then it's appalling. Still, press on. I support the author's definition of a 'massacre':

"For the purpose of this paper I define ‘massacre’ as the ‘one-sided’, indiscriminate killing of a group or groups of people .... This definition can also include single killings if they are part of a systematic and ongoing process of killings ...."

but I'm much less enthusiastic about his reliance on 'oral and historical' records, IF 'historical' ultimately means little more than 'oral' accounts, just from another time, or at a distance.

By the way, I transcribed three Royal Commissions, around the period 1857-1862, dealing with frontier conflict in what became Queensland in 1859: they are all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info, on the Queensland page. They deal with massacres on both sides, including outright murders of Aboriginal people.

The author refers to first-hand accounts, presumably eye-witness accounts, which are very persuasive. One problem with massacres is that, the further away an account may be in space and time from such an event, the larger the body count, and the more spectacular and lurid the distant accounts tend to become. So immediate, eye-witness accounts, particularly of participants, although they may UNDER-count the level of atrocities, is a sort of foundation from which to make judgments now, in 2016, for what may have happened 100-150 years ago.

However,

[TBC]

[continued]

I wouldn't rely on newspaper accounts for any accurate picture. Sensation sells papers: hence, in another context, newspapers may pick up on three little girls fleeing along a fence from town to town, IF it occurred, AND the more lurid accounts of massacres, if and when they occurred. But I think that's what the author means by 'historical accounts', i.e. newspapers.

So I'm sceptical about this:

"This strong body of historical and oral primary evidence lacks a corresponding archaeological signature for these events. Although the absence of archaeological evidence could be to some extent due to a lack of focus on this aspect of Aboriginal/European interaction, I propose that it has more to do with the nature of frontier violence in the Australian context and the kind of archaeological signature related to it, rather than a lack of research in this area."

Not very encouraging. This also surprised me: "There are no accounts of collecting the dead and burying them, of capturing people alive, tying them up, taking them to a central location and executing them into mass graves." I was also surprised at the low numbers of deaths that he cites - instead of the usual thirty, more often one or two. Perhaps, if anything, the eye-witness accounts under-estimate deaths, both immediate and lingering.

That a series of massacres occurred around Coniston is well-known. The Forrest River killings in 1926 are described on my web-site, on the Western Australian page. The missionary there, Rev. Gribble, may have exaggerated the casualty rate: Mrs. Mary Bennett, the communist champion of Aboriginal rights, was working there at the time as a nursing aide (I think), but doesn't seem to have ever written about any massacre.

Still, it certainly happened, but may have been over inter-group grievances - Sergeant Willshire was accused of being involved in such an atrocity in about 1891, west of Alice Springs: occasionally, some long-term coppers went rogue, effectively working for one Aboriginal group against another.

The author's summary, that

[TBC]

[continued]

The author's summary, that " .... The fact that no archaeological project has yet documented a massacre or a suspicious death in relation to Indigenous remains bears these factors out to some degree .... " obviously doesn't rule out the possibility that such massacres occurred, BUT neither do they suggest that they did. Very frustrating. I think the author focusses too much on the need for skeletal remains, rather than, say, teeth, BUT some association of teeth with bone fragments, ornaments, lead balls, shot, etc., would be that much more vital. Otherwise, no real evidence.

He writes of Aboriginal sensitivities about disturbing burials. But this may rule out vital evidence, and inevitably lead to a verdict of 'nothing to see here.' But clearly, such 'sensitivities' do NOT mean that anything necessarily occurred, or indeed DIDN'T occur. As well, time and human memory inflate and conflate accounts, and people may 'explain' distant events on the basis of 'Well, how else do you explain x or y ?' But the constant problem is that they do not provide or support evidence of violent deaths at the hands of whites.

I'm sure massacres occurred, certainly in western Queensland. I agee that as

" ..... Mike Rowland (2004) states, in one of the most detailed and moving histories relating to this topic, that the emphasis on ‘massacre’ reduces decades of all kinds of human suffering (from sexual slavery, beatings, forced labour, rape and forcible removals) to the semantics of numbers and terminology, thus masking the real long-term exploitation and misery of the Aboriginal frontier experience. For the central Queensland coast at least, I contend that it is unlikely we will find evidence for mass killings .... "

The Original Primal Crime of occupation was significant enough: it isn't necessary to over-gild the lily and devalue that original event - which is precisely what all of us need to re-assess, for genuine reconciliation to ever occur.

Joe

And yet, we need a Narrative - an evidence-based or -inferred, historically-rigorous base and sequence. Otherwise, we either drift or lurch from one baseless set of assertions to another. So what do we know, and what can we infer from our history ?

* Britain claimed sovereignty over, at first, just eastern Australia, then the lot, between 1788 and 1836. Alongside that political act, the issue of land ownership was inferred to simultaneously include the rights of foragers to maintain their customary practices, and the rights of non-Indigenous people to farm and pasture animals, in some form of co-existence;

* Indigenous people were unilaterally declared to be British subjects, a status often breached violently over the next 140 years;

* Learning as they went, in the first generation or so, invader-authorities attempted to set up ration systems, a school system and some form of European-type accommodation for local Aboriginal people around Sydney;

* Once the mountain barrier was conquered, European settlement moved rapidly across New South Wales and along the coasts. Inevitably, conflict occurred. Thirty Aboriginal people were killed in one massacre, for which nine (7 ? 11 ?) whites were executed in 1839 at Darlinghurst;

* If SA is any guide, people 'came in' as ration depots were set up - before their existence, Aboriginal people periodically (probably more so during droughts) raided pastoralists' huts and flocks. Once ration depots were operating, these raids ceased;

* From the earliest days, within a surprisingly short time, many Aboriginal people came in to work for money and exotic goods. Some took out land leases. Missions initiated schools which further attracted Aboriginal people into relations with Europeans: missionaries and farmers;

* Pastoralists sought local labour, so were happy to set up ration store-houses and issue rations, for free;

* During droughts, all able-bodied Aboriginal people were also entitled to rations;

* In SA, when white men got the vote, so did Aboriginal men; when white women got the vote in 1895, so did Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women could vote thirty years before British women;

[TBC]