The wheel has come full-circle and we are here - now! And now has become the time of reckoning over the colonisation of the landmass that we now know as Australia. While at the time the British colonial government carefully avoided acknowledging that people existed on the continent prior to their arrival, by adopting the infamous doctrine of terra nullius, many Australians descended from the original colonists (or not) are now re-examining the historical basis of their presence here. They enjoy the material wealth and lifestyle of the lands they have come to call home and until recently there was no need to doubt this, or be self-conscious about it being "home".
There clearly were people here, and it was the idea of an empty country that made it possible for those agents of Empire, such as the Uhr brothers, ancestors of David Marr, to go about attempting to empty it. Thus, settler colonials are having to come to terms with the fact that their ancestors were often murderous, criminal and racist, to what we may now understand as absurd and totally unnecessary lengths. And if they were not actually involved in these dirty deeds they were condoning them and even cheering them on. There were outraged voices of dissent that were vigorously opposed and few are in the historical record. It is a ghastly story.
It is hardly surprising that David Marr is now at the forefront, telling a family story about one of his great great grandparents and their siblings that truly angers him. He has said that researching and writing this history is "partly an act of atonement and partly an act of rage". David is palpably angry. The book is written with an urgent passion, brave in what it reveals and unforgiving in the light it casts on bloody deeds.
I can only echo all that reviewers and commentators have said about this book. As Richard King said in his review (The Australian October 13, 2023) this will surely be one of the books of the year "a magnificent achievement and a necessary intervention, on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native peoples". It is what we have come to expect from a master journalist and storyteller who has a brilliant track record in publishing. The research is thorough and in this David was assisted by his partner Sebastian Tesoriero who connected with the joys of Trove the online historical newspaper database. The search for the deeds of the Uhr brothers and the bloody swathe they and the Black Troopers cut through northern NSW and up through Queensland and into the Gulf country, during the nineteenth century, is satisfyingly forensic.
The aim of this review is to place the book Killing for Country: a family story in the context of a process of truth telling. There is no doubt about the truth and veracity of his argument, that the frontier was a place of bloody mayhem and murder. Many Aboriginal people have always known this and the more naive of us have known this since the early 1980s with the publication of Geoffrey Blomfield's groundbreaking Baal Belbora: the end of the Dancing and Henry Reynold's major important work The Other Side of the Frontier. What is left is to find a way to deal with this history in the best way possible, so as not to exacerbate social tensions and negatively impact race relations. My contention is that this is indeed a family story, to be resolved at that level.
On finishing reading the book I was left with the question: "What now?" What do we do with this awful history of murder and mayhem, the rage, grief and need for atonement that this history demands.
The first thing is to understand these events as history in a deeper sense, that is within a larger historical frame. Perhaps then we can understand what it is telling us of the true nature of human beings. This is the approach evident in Aboriginal cultural understandings of time and the ways in which conflicts are resolved.
The macro view is that historians are now recognising the colonial wars unleashed from the 16th century onwards as the first of the great wars, rather than WW1 as has been previously universally understood (by historians). The death toll from these wars was immense: the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the 16 - 18th centuries has an estimated death toll of 28 million. The British Empire, that annexed the continent of Australia as part of the 24% of the Earth's total land area it held by 1920, wrought an estimated death toll of 100 million people. It was by far the largest empire in history and a source of great pride for those who tied their fortunes to it. One could say that it was the fashion. The colonial wars were fought by European powers over the Indigenous people of the global south, not only in Australia but in Africa, Asia, South America and Mexico, India and China. The aim was to dispossess, enslave, destroy and claim all of what these people had of value, for the Empire. They were enormously successful.
No small part of this success is due to the specific kind of white masculinity that enabled the bloody conquest, that seemed to relish the lawless frontier and the opportunity to prove oneself. This specific masculine ideal of violence as normative was nurtured and fostered as a part of the Imperial ambitions of Britain, and thus built into colonial culture and politics. The workings of what the anthropologist Rita Laura Segato refers to as the masculine mandate whereby the libido is conscripted into providing constant proof that one truly is a man was the order of the day. Subservience to the masculine mandate is for both men and women the only way to exercise any power "power is expressed...exhibited and consolidated, as virile potency in a brutal form". Thus arises the pedagogy of cruelty through which Segato names all of what is manifest on human bodies to reduce them to things - violence, terror and cruelty.
In interviews David Marr has been emphatic that the people of the killing times are the same as those of today. It is my view that they are separated by huge social, cultural and political gaps and contexts that shape them. This has been a long debate in sociology, is it nature or nurture that produces certain kinds of people? And in history, for example are great men the product of their times or are they born to be great whatever the context they arrive to live in? In the case of settler colonial masculinist ideology, the society back in Britain was often shocked by the excessive violence of the frontier. They found the frontiersmen an embarrassment and sought ways to curb them. Perhaps some realised they were a necessary evil and continued to fund and support them.
However, David Marr has a point about the unchanged nature of people over time when you consider the murdered and missing Aboriginal women and children in Australia. For example, the crimes of the serial murderer Richard Dorrough against Aboriginal and Pasifica women. He, who perversely wanted his crimes to be known, can be seen as subservient to the masculinist mandate. There are many other perpetrators that exist in a kind of subculture. The phenomenon of murdered and missing Aboriginal women and children is evidence of the continuation of the gendered conquest and pedagogy of cruelty in contemporary Australian society.
To enlarge on the macro view, the huge death toll in all of the worldwide wars since the 16th century have not seemed to make a dent on the continuing overpopulation of the Earth. We need to consider that huge hordes of Europeans moved out to the global south because they could not continue to live in home countries that were already overpopulated. The 18th century saw famines and food riots in Britain as well as famously in France. The colonial wars and subsequent mass migrations were a result of the very pressing need to find other lands on which to grow food and be able to live, as well as the search for the bounty that these lands could offer in timber, animal and mineral resources.
While the idea of Manifest Destiny propelled settlers in North America, settlers in Australia were not untouched by this belief and also had the idea of an empty continent - therefore those who were there beforehand were not legitimate, had no rights, not human).
And still yet - What now? It's important to understand that the way people see history, utilise it or deal with it varies according to cultural approaches. Aboriginal cultural understanding has it that our ancestors beyond the last two generations (that are usually in living memory) go back into eternal time where they are part of the paradigms for the proper human behavior on Earth, also known as the Law. These paradigms are accessed through stories that are often attached to constellations and landforms. Eternal time is everpresent, it is here "running along beside us" enabling a connection through eruptions of eternal time into the present. Eternal time then is connected to normal time in which we live, this is the "everywhen" that is often used to describe Aboriginal understandings of time. It is more than that, it is known as tjukurpa by Central Australian anangu, and by other names elsewhere. Altogether it is the sacred, that is more easily accessed when in the state between dreaming and wakefulness. Hence the misnomer, the Dreaming.
If the Law is transgressed then people have to be held to account for their actions and the aim of a full and frank hearing is for people to be able to continue to live together in a good way. All involved are given an opportunity to speak their truth and an appropriate punishment is decided on and meted out. Once resolved, settled, these matters are never spoken of again. It is considered that the business is finished. This is common across the continent but it is what is called Makaratta by the yolngu of Arnhemland.
So, what now? The Yoorrook Commission in Victoria defines truth telling as the act of telling true history by listening to the experiences of First Peoples. David Marr has written this book as a contribution to the truth telling process and this is, as he says, a family story. It holds the key to the important connections and relationships that can grow out of meeting with the "other" side. There are many descendants of the survivors of the killing times in North Queensland who have their own histories to tell. As only one example, children were brought into Mona Mona Mission by the troopers, on horseback. Buluwai community leader Willy Brim at Kuranda is descended from two of them. In some places the notorious Darcy Uhr is still in living memory. What remains is for the Uhr family descendants to quietly reach out and begin to make connections across the divide of a brutal history.
This is a history for which no-one alive today is responsible or culpable, but for which we can feel deep regret and seek to reconnect and heal the bonds that bind us as human beings. Our lives will all be so much better for it.
Dr Victoria Grieves Williams is Warraimaay from the midnorth coast of NSW and an historian She was recently on the advisory committee of the Reconciliation Australia project "Recognising Community Truth Telling: an exploration of local truth telling in Australia"(2023). Dr Williams is active in truth telling research, process and practice through the concept of healing histories.
This article was first published in The Australian.
