Some Basic Information
Wherever we live or visit in Australia, we are on the ancestral homeland of a particular Aboriginal family, we are either on or in the vicinity of their ancient birthing centres, cemeteries, ceremonial areas and agricultural areas.
**1770 Aboriginal people have occupied this continent for many thousands of years, evolving a highly sophisticated system of law, language and economy. Trade routes ran throughout the country and north into Asia.
**1788 The fist fleet estimated that there were three million Aborigines in Australia based on the population in the vicinity of the new colony. This estimate was based on the assumption that Aborigines only inhabited coastal areas and were incapable of surviving inland. (London downgraded this estimate to three hundred thousand)
** The first one hundred years of Australia was marked by a vicious war between Aborigines and settlers. In some areas guerilla resistance continued into the twentieth century. The gun, water and food poisoning and smallpox were the weapons that subdued the guerilla armies that rose all around the country,
**In the late eighteen hundreds bands of Native Police under the command of white officers tracked and murdered Aboriginal people still posing a threat to the expansionof white farms
** The beginning of last century saw the birth of Australian federation. Also the Aboriginal protection laws and reserves were instituted around the country. Most of the surviving aboriginal population were rounded up onto reserves and their lives were regulated, including travel, marriages and employment by white protectors, often police.
Under the protection laws Aboriginal people were paid under award wages, most of which was held by various state governments and never paid to workers or their families. Many Aboriginal Children, especially fair skinned children and those still living a traditional lifestyle, were forcibly removed from their families and raised in orphanages or adopted to white families.
** Today an Aboriginal person is up to 27 times as likely to be imprisoned than a white person, On Average, Aboriginal people die twenty years younger than white people.
Battle Mountain link to Mount Isa Region Information System
If you get a chance, read Grasby, A., & Hill, M. (1988). Six Australian Battlefields: The black resistance to invasion and the white struggle against colonial oppression. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
from the Courier Mail (Queensland’s major Newspaper)
A FORMER Queensland police commissioner slaughtered hundreds of Aborigines, according to his own hand-written files.
January 25, 2003, Saturday
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1
HEADLINE: Aborigine slaughter recorded
BYLINE: Tony Koch
The Courier-Mail found the notes in the State Archives while investigating claims by historian Keith Windschuttle who released a book last year denying claims of widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aborigines. The personal reports of Sub-Inspector Frederick Urquhart who rose to become Queensland Police Commissioner from 1917 to 1921, show Aboriginal men, women and children were slaughtered on his orders after the death of a white pastoralist.
He led native police in what is reputedly Australia’s biggest massacre of Aborigines — the 1884 Battle Mountain attack on Kalkadoon people in northwest Queensland.
Historian Robert Armstrong in his book The Kalkadoons estimated 600 Aborigines assembled on the crags of Battle Mountain and about 200 were killed by the carbines of Urquhart’s police.
The number of dead is disputed, but historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey once noted: “A tribe was slaughtered in such numbers that for decades a hill was littered with bleached bones of warriors, gins and piccaninnies.”
The Urquhart reports refer to “dispersal” of Aborigines, a term of the era for killing.
He wrote: “I gave the order to fire and 30 of the blacks were shot”. In another he described how his group surrounded a “large number” of blacks and opened fire. He noted “none escaped”.
Courier Mail
January 25, 2003, Saturday
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 32
HEADLINE: Dispersal of the facts
BYLINE: Tony Koch
No matter how delicate the language of the time, it’s clear the massacre of Aborigines was common practice in colonial days, writes news editor, Tony Koch
‘A dispersal was, in fact, a camouflage for indiscriminate killing, rape and child-braining’ The Queenslander
THE Queensland State Archives file has a rather innocuous reference title, in script handwriting: “Murder of Mr E. Watson at Pine Tree Station by Blacks in May 1889. Blacks dispersed by S.I. Urquhart.”
It is the personal report of Queensland police sub-inspector Frederick Urquhart to the police commissioner of the time, giving details of his investigation into Watson’s violent death.
A periodical of the same decade, The Queenslander, illuminates the jargon of the time. It says: “How many of us understand the euphemistic word ‘dispersal’. If it is advisable that, as a colony, we should indulge in wholesale murder of the (Aboriginal) race, let us have the courage of our opinions and murder openly and deliberately, calling it murder, not dispersal. “It was very convenient for native police officers, and for the European colonisers, to refer to a native police action as a ‘dispersal’ with its overtones of politeness and nebulousness.
“A dispersal was, in fact, a camouflage for indiscriminate killing, rape and child-braining.”
Each of Urquhart’s reports of the time in this regard used the term “dispersal” which, it becomes increasingly obvious the more one reads, does mean “killing”. In other instances he does not bother to be at all obscure, using terms such as “execution” and, when surrounding “savages” in the bush and opening fire, he subsequently writes that “none escaped”.
The recent contretemps among Australian academics who refer to themselves as “historians” is centred on a book titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Keith Windschuttle, in which the author “re-appraises the now widely accepted story about conflict between colonists and Aborigines in Australian history”.
The dust-jacket of Windschuttle’s book declares that in a close re-examination of the primary sources used by historians, the author concluded that much of their case is poorly founded, other parts seriously mistaken and some of it outright fabrication: “The author finds the British colonisation of Australia was the least violent of all Europe’s encounters with the New World. It did not meet any organised resistance. Conflict was sporadic rather than systematic. The claim that the colonists committed genocide is unsupported by the historical evidence.”
What is perplexing in the debate is that highly educated people, presumably with well-honed skills in research and the time and financial assistance to indulge that passion, get side-tracked on esoteric issues of personal dispute, and argue the actual numbers alleged to have been killed. Is it any less significant or appalling if the number of indigenous human beings slaughtered was 30 instead of 300, or hundreds instead of thousands?
The undeniable fact is that Aboriginal people were shot like animals, poisoned or “dispersed”. It was government policy to condone it. It was widely practised in Queensland, and sanctioned by the authorities, because the perpetrators like Urquhart were never questioned. Instead they were lauded and promoted.
There can be little argument that Frederick Urquhart, who rose to become the police commissioner of Queensland and later the administrator (governor) of the Northern Territory, was possibly the greatest mass murderer in Australia’s history. And he was proud of it!
What also is obvious is that the “culture” of the time thought it proper that Aborigines should be exterminated. They were not considered to be human beings — otherwise they would have been afforded the dignity of such niceties as burial after they were killed. Instead they were left to rot or to be shredded by native animals.