Dispersal, denialism and Australia’s history

It is a story of the settlement of this continent.

Of Australia.

It is part of the history of this land; facts that are laid bare, with names, dates, locations, numbers killed, all supported by accounts written in reports, newspapers, letters, diaries and petitions.

And etched into our landscape with names such as Slaughterhouse Creek, Gravesend and Butchers Creek.

David Marr’s book Killing for Country is not only the story of bloodshed supported by the politicians and powerbrokers of the time but also the story of how the original inhabitants of this vast continent were denied their humanity, hunted relentlessly and considered to be merely an impediment to making this nation “safe”.

It is the story of how the social and political power of the squatters — men who took the land with no legal claim to it — ruled supreme, influencing lawmakers and politicians and asserting their absolute right to behave as they saw fit.

During the second half of the 1800s, as settlers pushed further and further into new areas, they were faced with increasing resistance from the “natives”.

The frontiers of the settlement were a dangerous place, with killings on both sides.

However, it was the behaviour of the notorious Native Police, under the command of its gentlemen officers, that contributed to the enormous death toll.

In effect, they were given carte blanche to sweep away all impediments to settlement — to cleanse the area in a way that “taught the blacks a lesson”.

In describing the frontier wars, the University of Newcastle academic and historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan called it ‘’… the most brutal colonial invasion in the nineteenth century Empire. So many were slaughtered. Kidnapping never ceased. Every acre was taken. None of the huge wealth earned in their country flowed back to its original owners. Laws counted for nothing. No treaties were made. And when the fighting was over, we set about forgetting how Australia was won.”

Many people at the time turned their eyes on what was happening and chose to stay silent, even quietly supporting the killings as a necessary evil to “clear” the land for sheep, cattle and settlement.

Those opposed to the inhumanity and brutality of the seizure of the land were ridiculed and silenced.

Belittling terms such as “wailers after Aborigines” who were “desirous of acquiring a reputation for humanity” jumped from the pages of The Sydney Herald. Do-gooders: “philanthropists, who sit at ease at home to talk and write of the ‘poor aborigines’ … and look upwards, praying pardon for those who are engaged in the work of exterminating a people from the face of the earth. Why, it is in the order of nature that, as civilisation advances, savage nations must be exterminated sooner or later.”

It was this response to questions being asked about the ongoing brutality of the frontier that sits eerily today as if ghosts from the past had made their presence felt recently in the referendum campaign.

Writing recently in The Guardian, Marr explored the impact of the manner of the early settlement and the role of the squatters on the essence of Australia.

“The claim the bush knows best shapes contemporary Australian politics profoundly. And it’s as old as NSW. The squatters demanded city folk shut up because they could never know the challenges of the bush. Those who dared back then to call the killings murder were dismissed as “humbugging maniacs and hypocrites who write and prate of matters of which they know nothing whatever”.“

When interviewed about his book, Marr, linking the past to the present, commented: “I was intrigued by the shadowy forms of today’s politics emerging from the frontier wars – particularly the still potent belief in many quarters that the Aboriginal people deserve nothing for the continent they lost. Polls show hostility is strongest where most blood was shed. Despising those we have wronged is another way we humans have of dealing with our shame.”

Have we replaced the carbine with the pencil and ballot paper?

Refusing to hear their voices, believing the lies about the lack of support for the referendum in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities? Another addition to the “Great Australian Silence”?

So here we are now.

Journalist and author Bernard Keane recently summed up our place as a nation.

“Australia now occupies a unique position globally. It is the only colonial settler society in the world that not only does not recognise in any way those dispossessed by colonialism but whose citizens have actively rejected any such recognition.

“In doing so, Australians have turned their backs on historical fact. “No” is not merely a denial — it is denialism. It sustains, in constitutional terms, the fiction that no-one was here before Europeans arrived, that no-one was dispossessed, that the continent was terra nullius.

“Far from being a maintenance of the status quo, the success of the No campaign transforms the Australian constitution into a living lie, a rejection of historical fact in favour of white fantasy.

“The foundational document of Australia now deliberately, purposefully, with the endorsement of Australian voters, denies the foundational act of the Australian polity, the dispossession of First Peoples. It is now a legal fiction, and the country along with it.”

While our legal system recognises the lie of Terra nullius, our founding document Australia’s Constitution — continues to ignore the indisputable fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been custodians of these lands and waters for over 60,000 years.

As a nation, this is the situation we are now in.

Will we have the courage to act, to acknowledge this truth about ourselves, or will we once again avert our eyes and choose to stay silent?

Join the Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group as we continue to support self-determination, Treaty and truth-telling.

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