Ingeborg van Teeseling
Imagine Australia under attack. We have been spared for a long time but now it has finally come: an enemy on the streets. Killing indiscriminately, raping, cutting off heads, throwing babies over cliffs. You know the thing, seen it on television often enough. In other countries, sure. But now it is happening here. It starts on a Wednesday morning and before you know it, you lose your house, your friends, your wife, your child. They plant a flag, tell you Australia is now theirs and if you resist (or actually, if you exist), you will be killed. Quickly, they are everywhere. More and more of them; hundreds, then thousands and millions of them. Still, you don’t take it lying down. You organise people around you and you fight. For many decades, more than a century even, you fight. You lose three-quarters of your people and all of your land, but you don’t give up. Finally, after almost 150 years, it is over. You are still being treated as second-rate citizens, of course. But the war is over. You have lost, but you are still here. A win of sorts. Only now, the enemy tells you there never was a war. Now they’ve won, they say you never fought in the first place. You were too placid for that, too unintelligent, not organised enough. You just gave your country, and all your people, to them. No battles, no resistance, no guerilla. Nothing.
Basically, that is what this story is about. And it is what Rachel Perkins is discussing in The Australian Wars, the amazing documentary series SBS broadcast in 2022. There is a book now and you can still watch the series on SBS On Demand. Which you should, because it will tell you something about Australian patriots, who fought in defence of our country. Still, their names are not inscribed on the walls of the Australian War Memorial. Their leaders are not revered in song, history books and memorials. In fact, most people don’t even know who they were. If they do, their resistance is often categorised as ‘doomed to fail’ and spoken about in a pitying, slightly condescending tone. Great warriors reduced to sad natives throwing spears at soldiers with guns.
War, the Oxford Dictionary says, is an armed conflict between two or more parties, usually fought for political ends, often over control of territory. In Australia, this started on 29 April 1770, when James Cook fired his musket twice, wounding the first Aboriginal man in the country. Then he stole his possessions, including his land, claiming it for the British crown. From then on, as Perkins shows, it was on for young and old, following the same pattern everywhere: new people coming in, violently driving the old people off their land, putting a fence around it, building a house and calling it pioneering. But nowhere did Indigenous people take that lying down. In the beginning, there was Pemulwuy, who used fire and a coalition of different Aboriginal groups to organise the resistance. There were people fighting on the Cumberland Plains, in Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria. The further the takeover went, the more intense the struggle. Until the 1930s. Which is less than 100 years ago.
Perkins points out that during those Frontier Wars an estimated 100,000 people died. Which is about as many as perished during overseas conflicts. There are 10,000 memorials across the countries to remember the Australians who died abroad. Silence surrounds the Australians who died at home, to protect our country. They didn’t exist, it never happened. Although it established the nation, although it is its foundational story, we prefer to look away. Partly, of course, because what happened was shameful and unlawful. That too started early on. When Pemulwuy killed John McIntyre, governor Phillip’s gamekeeper, Phillip suspended British law. In asking Watkin Tench to kill ten random people (subjects of the Crown, at that), he gave an order that had more to do with revenge than obeying legal rules. And in doing so, a precedence was set. In this country, white people were allowed to kill, rape, abduct, steal. Anything ‘for the purpose of punishing the hostile natives and clearing the country of them entirely’, as Lachlan Macquarie wrote to his bosses. Dawn raids, cutting people’s heads off, shooting them in the back, burning them alive, forcing children off cliffs. Even the governor knew it was neither civilised nor according to the rules of war. So, he censored accounts, sanitised events. Nothing to see here. It never happened.
Silent but deadly. Whether it was organised by the government, companies or individuals, wherever white people went, genocide followed. But also, always, everywhere, the refusal to accept the invaders. Defiance, confrontation, small and large battles. Over time, when the settlers multiplied and brought in horses, repeater guns and dysfunctional consciences, the violence ramped up. Massacres now killed hundreds instead of dozens. Native police, a South African Apartheid idea, were used to flog, exile, murder, engage in ethnic cleansing and take the lead in managing concentration camps. And yet, until the end, this was never just a story of victimhood, but also of resistance, strength and courage. We know. Newspapers and letters at the time described the guerilla, government paperwork called it war, and forensic evidence and archaeology have backed Indigenous oral testimony. For a lot of people, that doesn’t matter. It is painful to confront the truth, so they replace it with myth and fiction. Our country was born on Flanders’ fields instead of the Cowpastures and the Kimberley. We were heroes, patriots and victims instead of villains, invaders and perpetrators. The Australian War Memorial, the official site of remembrance, still says that there is no evidence for the Frontier Wars and that they won’t include them in their version of the story of the nation. And we broadly support them. Look at what happened during the Referendum. One question, though, the universal one. There but for the grace of God: what would we do if it happened to us? If there really was an enemy on the streets? Would we fight? How would we be remembered? Would we care? Would we? And does that change anything?
You can watch the complete series on SBS On Demand here: https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-australian-wars
You can see the site map to the massacres here:
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
There is also a book now:
For more on the great Indigenous freedom fighters, have a look at
https://australia-explained.com.au/rebels (Pemulwuy, Billebellary, Simon Wonga, William Barak, Charles Perkins, Dundalli, Eddie Mabo, Fred Maynard, Margaret Tucker, Pearl Gibbs, Truganini, Vincent Lingiari, Yagan)
For the story of knowledge and wilful silence: https://australia-explained.com.au/history/history-genocide-1-with-the-intent-to-destroy, https://australia-explained.com.au/history/history-genocide-2-a-lost-generation-of-children, https://australia-explained.com.au/history/history-genocide-3-about-actively-looking-away
This article originally appeared on the author's Australia Explained website and is republished here by permission.
Picture credit: Promotional poster for The Australian Wars TV documentary, Dir. Rachel Perkins, reproduced by permission SBS.
