Black diggers are hailed on Anzac Day. But the Indigenous 'Great War' was in Australia | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sun, 23/04/2017 - 8:24am

Frontier wars almost certainly claimed more Indigenous lives than the Australian death toll in the first world war. If settler Australia is ever to deal properly with the legacy of frontier conflict, that comparison would be a good place to start

I know the spirits are out here. And when the wind starts to howl across the plain in great booming gusts, it might just be the sound of them crying.

I’ve visited many massacre sites in Australia. But usually I’ve been in the company of a local Indigenous custodian, someone who rubbed their scent on my face and hands and chanted to warn the spirits that this white man comes in peace. While it feels like I’m anything but alone, I’m by myself in the long grass that is blowing sideways.

His people’s creek was renamed not to commemorate those murdered but the very act of murdering them

[W]e arrive at the sobering total of 41,040 Aborigines killed during 3,420 official frontier dispersals across almost 40 years of conflict. This mortality figure … is a mathematical and statistical projection, produced by cautiously sampling the fragmentary evidence left to us about the severe degree of destruction accompanying the long project of land dispossession in colonial Queensland. It is not and can never be a precisely accurate figure, nor is it a confidently absolute or maximal one. That number will never be known … Furthermore, let us be entirely clear about what we are claiming here. The 41,040 death rate does not represent anywhere near a full quotient of those who fell on the Queensland frontier. It is merely a native police statistic that does not even cover, at this point, official dispersal activities across the prior decade of 1849-59. These may well have accounted for another 3,000–4,000 deaths.

It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.

Rival tribesmen would be enlisted and militarised to slaughter other blacks

Hot for blood, the black troopers are laid on the trail of the tribe; then follow the careful tracking, the surprise, the shooting at a distance safe from spears, the deaths of many of the males, the capture of the women, who know that if they abstain from flight they will be spared; the gratified lust of the savage, and the sub-inspector’s report that the tribe has been “dispersed”, for such is the official term used to convey the occurrence of these proceedings.

When the tribe has gone through several repetitions of this experience and the chief part of its young men been butchered, the women, the remnant of the men and such children as the black troopers have not troubled themselves to shoot, are let in or allowed to come to the settler’s homestead and the war is at an end. Finally a shameful disease is introduced and finishes what the rifle began.

My little protégée of a girl … rode on the front of my saddle [to Bowen] and crying nearly all the way … I took compassion on her and decided to take her home and bring her up with my own children, which I did, and even sent her to school with my own.

Many people officially associated with the memorial deny that frontier conflict was 'war'