As the toll of Australia’s frontier brutality keeps climbing, truth telling is long overdue | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Mon, 04/03/2019 - 6:30am

The myth of benign, peaceful settlement persists today – even as historians reveal a far more sinister picture

• The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront
• A massacre map of the frontier wars – interactive

A friend sent me a photograph he’d taken in north-west Queensland of the memorial to the Kalkadoon warriors who, in 1884, fought what was perhaps the biggest battle against government forces to unfold on this continent.

Local oral history, black and white, has it that dozens of Indigenous fighters were shot dead after they charged native police contingents under the command of Sub-Inspector FC Urquhart at Battle Mountain, about 60km from Cloncurry.

The wars that raged across this continent claimed more Indigenous lives than the 62,000 Australian soldiers who died in the first world war

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.

His lectures profoundly influenced historians partly because of the image he captured: for a practice based on documentation, archiving and storytelling, silence is a compelling idea. And a whole-scale silence … indicated a bold reimagining of a national historiography on Stanner’s part.

The 26th January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia’s Aborigines. It is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years’ so-called ‘progress’ in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country.

White memories of racial violence have more often been expunged than preserved, while the decimating impact of disease and deprivation has often been accepted as a comprehensive explanation of a rapidly declining indigenous population. There is a very old belief that settlement was uniquely peaceful which can be traced back to the earliest writing on Australian colonisation.

It appears the condemned were forced to gather wood for their own immolation