Forgotten War: New edition

By Henry Reynolds

'We are at war with them,' wrote a Tasmanian settler in 1831. 'What we call their crime is what in a white man we should call patriotism.' Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. So why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier wars now than it was one hundred years ago? In Forgotten War, winner of the 2014 Victorian Premier's Award for non-fiction, influential historian Henry Reynolds makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation without acknowledging the wars fought on our own soil. Reynolds argues the resistance by First Nations warriors to the invasion of their homelands, lasting for more than a hundred years, can now be seen as a significant chapter in the global history of anti-colonial rebellion. To be appreciated and understood in a way that has scarcely begun to dawn on our national consciousness, and admired far more widely than our role as adjunct imperialists fighting with Britain and America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781742238432

Book preview

Cover image for Forgotten War, by Henry Reynolds

FORGOTTEN

WAR

HENRY REYNOLDS is one of Australia’s best-known historians. He grew up in Hobart and was educated at Hobart High School and the University of Tasmania. In 1965, he accepted a lectureship at the University College of Townsville (now James Cook University), which sparked an interest in the history of relations between settlers and Aboriginal people. In 2000, he took up a professorial fellowship at the University of Tasmania. His pioneering work has changed the way we see the intertwining of black and white history in Australia. His books with NewSouth include The Other Side of the Frontier (reissue); What’s Wrong with Anzac? (as co-author); Forgotten War, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction; Unnecessary Wars; This Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited; Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement; and, most recently, Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader & Tasmanian War Hero (as co-author).

‘Impressive … In terse, uncompromising sentences, Reynolds lays out a new road map towards true reconciliation.’

RAYMOND EVANS, The Age

‘A brilliant light shone into a dark forgetfulness: ground-breaking, authoritative, compelling.’

KATE GRENVILLE

‘Forgotten War invites us to recognise and applaud the courage and tenacity of those Aborigines who defended their lands against impossible odds and to recognise the cost to them and to their descendants.’

FRANKLIN RICHARDS

‘Forgotten War is a work of passion by one of Australia’s greatest living historians, a scholar who has helped to redefine the relationships between white and black Australians … His measured prose and scholarly authority should be heeded.’

PETER STANLEY, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Henry Reynolds’ Forgotten War calls for the principle of ‘lest we forget’ to include all Australians who died in defending their country, including Indigenous people. Timely historical analysis of newly collated and discovered evidence shows that the coming of European settlers to Aboriginal territories was firmly defined as a frontier war … Reynolds makes a compelling and measured case that we should officially honour and acknowledge the tens of thousands of people who died in our frontier wars.’

Judges’ Report, The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

FORGOTTEN

WAR

HENRY

REYNOLDS

Logo: New South Publishing.

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this book contains words and descriptions written by non-Indigenous people in the past that may be confronting and would be considered inappropriate today. It also contains the names of deceased Indigenous people and graphic descriptions of historical events that may be disturbing to some readers.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

https://unsw.press

© Henry Reynolds 2022

First published 2013

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover design Mika Tabata

Cover image Warfare between Aboriginal warriors and mounted white colonists / Samuel Calvert. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1A distressing moment

2But was it warfare?

3What kind of warfare?

4The cost of war

5What was at stake?

6Two very different wars

7One history or two?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The original edition of Forgotten War was published in 2013. It brought together research I had been doing for forty years and reflected many of the changes which had taken place in the country itself during those four decades. When I began teaching at the fledgling University College of Townsville (now James Cook University) in 1966, Australian history was rapidly emerging as a major field of study in both universities and high schools. A new generation of historians were producing an unprecedented number of general histories crafted for a rapidly expanding market. They were, in most cases, very useful as text books or for background reading.

But living and teaching in north Queensland I came to realise that despite their many virtues, practically all of them neglected the country’s First Nations people. They typically began their narratives with the voyages of the European explorers or the arrival of the British in 1788. Some attention was paid to the Aborigines in the early years of New South Wales and Tasmania but interest faltered as the themes of exploration, pioneering, national development and overseas wars came to dominate the collective narrative. The ubiquitous, albeit sporadic conflict, out in the vast hinterland was rarely noticed. It was about this time that I came across the comments made in 1938 by the anthropologist Bill Stanner who had observed that the destruction of Aboriginal society was ‘not commonly regarded as a present and continuing tragedy, but (for some curious reason) rather as something which took place a long time ago, in the very early days, and so is no longer a real complication.’¹

With the First Nations left out of the national story, much of the violence conveniently disappeared as well. Many histories of the first sixty years of the 20th centuary commemorated what was proclaimed to be Australia’s uniquely peaceful history. It was a continent that had not known internal warfare, where its residents had been very slow to kill one another and even on the vast frontier men rarely carried guns. It was a version of history that would have astonished any well-informed resident of colonial Australia. The reality of a violent frontier was well known and widely disseminated in the many local newspapers. Not only were incidents of conflict reported but there were intense debates about the morality of colonisation and its accompanying bloodshed. The question in enduring contention was not whether violence was taking place but whether or not it was necessary. This debate can be easily recovered in every part of Australia from at least as early as the 1820s until the interwar years. Official documents, public speeches, contemporary books, private letters all told the same story.

Several questions are therefore inescapable: How was this 19th century awareness so easily and completely expunged? Was there a compelling desire in the new federal Australia to put a troubling past away? Was it an idea related to the contemporaneous and overpowering belief that the Aborigines were members of a dying race condemned to eventual oblivion by the iron laws of evolution? As a corollary, was their role in the past diminished because they had no future? Was the problem that historians who had studied in the capital cities – often rounding off their training in Britain – had no experience of life in the more remote parts of Australia? Was there a collective desire to forget the harsh truth about the colonisation of the country?

It took Bill Stanner to renew his concern with the subject and call the historical profession to account in his famous 1968 Boyer Lectures ‘After the Dreaming’. He declared that the country’s historians had collectively engaged in ‘the Great Australian Silence’. Inattention on such a scale, he argued, could ‘not be explained by absent-mindedness’. It was, in fact, ‘a structural matter’; the historians had traditionally framed their view of the past ‘from a window which had been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. They were culpable of engaging in ‘something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’.²

It was a rallying call for a generation of young historians all over the country. It was an exciting venture to challenge this cult of forgetfulness. It coincided with the sudden emergence of the modern Aboriginal movement which can be traced from the foundation of the first relevant national organisation, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in 1958, the campaign for the 1967 referendum and the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972. Much of the new history was written for academic journals or research theses but it spread into the wider community by a myriad channels finding its way into poetry, songs, novels, films, radio and television programmes and articles in the metropolitan newspapers. It is not surprising that much of the emphasis in this new scholarship was on frontier violence. It was after all both commonplace and confronting. It had been there wherever historians looked – from southern Tasmania to the tip of Cape York, from the Pacific coast in the east to the shores of the Indian Ocean in the west. And it came as such a surprise to anyone who had learned their history from the teachers who had perpetuated the great Australian silence.

Controversy was inevitable. It was only to be expected. Details of the story that was re-emerging had been buried and forgotten for almost three generations. It was challenging and for many people deeply disturbing. History, quite suddenly, was swept up into the storm centre of culture wars that were troubling the nation in the years both before and after the turn of the century. The most dramatic illustration of the influence of the radical new version of national history emerged from the High Court in the 1992 Mabo judgement. The recognition of native title and the rejection of the concept of terra nullius, sealed into Australian law since 1788, was revolutionary enough. But the case also challenged conventional views of national history. In their joint judgement, Justices William Deane and Mary Gaudron referred to what they declared was,

the conflagration of oppression and conflict which was, over the following century, to spread across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the Aboriginal peoples and leave a national legacy of unutterable shame.³

It was a statement which shocked conservative Australia. The new historiography had escaped from the lecture theatre and the seminar room and had now infected the highest court in the land.

Perhaps more than any other event, it provoked a fierce reaction which also reached the high peaks of political life when John Howard came to power in 1996. He made it quite clear that he was personally hostile to what had become known as the ‘black arm band’ version of Australian history. He wanted Australians to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’ about their history. He believed that children could no longer feel proud about their national history. Their patriotism was being eroded. With Prime Ministerial patronage the reaction to the new historiography gained greater traction. The history wars intensified with a fierce national debate following the 2002 publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847. While concentrating on the history of Tasmania, Windschuttle’s target was the whole corpus of Aboriginal history which he argued had been deeply compromised for political reasons. The historians in question had distorted the story of the past and had actually ‘fabricated’ much of their evidence. They had greatly exaggerated the extent of frontier conflict and had consequently inflated the numbers killed. The Tasmanian Aborigines, he asserted, could not be seen and patriots and warriors engaged in a guerrilla war but rather as thieves and criminals bent on stealing European goods like sugar and flour.

It was an intellectual counter-revolution which provoked intense and angry debate. But there is no doubt that his views gathered up many fellow travellers. Neither shame nor remorse were required. The black arm band could be folded away. Australians could turn back to that sunny story of pioneering and nation building. But paradoxically the most enduring result of the history wars was that they led to the opening of a new generation of scholarship. Established historians returned to their old notes, new scholars joined them. High-quality research was completed in Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, New South Wales and Western Australia. The central importance of frontier violence was confirmed. The terrible cost of the ‘killing times’ was re-established beyond reasonable doubt. And that was where the matter rested when I started to write Forgotten War in 2012.

I had chosen the title quite deliberately. There was, by then, a wide recognition of the reality of frontier violence. It was no longer a forgotten aspect of national history. But the question of whether or not it was war was still in contention. For many people, the fighting was just too sporadic and lacked the gravity of our overseas wars. And when the book came out Australia was already engaged in the cavalcade of publicly funded Great War commemoration which continued with even greater momentum until the end of 2018. There was full recognition of the role of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the armed forces, but, if anything, the increasing militarisation of national history eclipsed the heroic resistance of the First Nations in every part of the continent. The intense and overwhelming national focus on wars fought overseas was illustrated in April 1918 with the official opening of the $100 million Sir John Monash Centre in Villers-Bretonneux in northern France. It is doubtful if any government money, state or federal, has ever been directly invested in commemorating the frontier wars.

But now, nearly four years later, global events have rapidly shifted attitudes in unexpected ways. A series of overlapping developments have reverberated here at home. The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States had immediate local relevance. The deeply contentious history of slavery whipped up angry protests in both America and Britain. Statues of Confederate leaders were toppled. Major universities examined their historical ties with the slave trade. In Britain, too, statues of prominent slavers were removed among a general reckoning with the legacies of fortunes made in the West Indies. But the tide of radical reassessment widened out even further to question the whole legacy of European imperialism. In Latin America, statues of Columbus were removed. Indian warriors who fought the Spaniards were commemorated. Their names were bestowed on streets, plazas, schools and theatres. Their faces appeared on bank notes. And it was all taking place against a backdrop of the vast shift of political and economic power away from the old imperial powers in Western Europe and North America to South and East Asia.

Australia cannot avoid the consequences of these epochchanging developments. How we respond is still a matter of speculation. But it will certainly be distinctive and in harmony with our anomalous place in the world – an offshoot of Britain in an Asian–Pacific hemisphere. We remain a colony that never quite became part of the international drive for decolonisation, the most consequential global development of the past century. And we can now see decolonisation overshadows in significance Europe’s thirty years of war, 1914 to 1945. And against this backdrop Australia spent hundreds of millions of dollars commemorating the battles our young men fought on the other side of the world for strategic aims which often had little to do with the homeland.

The resistance by the First Nations to the invasion of their country⁴ lasting for more than a hundred years across vast continental distances can now be seen as a significant chapter in the global history of anti-colonial rebellion. It is likely that, as it becomes better known, it will be appreciated and understood all over the world in way that has scarcely begun to dawn on our national consciousness. It will be admired far more widely than our role as adjunct imperialists fighting with Britain and America all over the world.

1

A DISTRESSING MOMENT

It was a distressing moment in the short history of Van Diemen’s Land. In the middle of September 1831 the newspapers in Hobart and Launceston reported the details of what they called a ‘most appalling affair’.¹ The first news was that a prominent settler, Captain Bartholomew Boyle Thomas, and his manager, James Parker, were missing from their property Northdown on the north-west fringe of the settled districts. After several days of painful suspense the dreadful news broke. They had been killed by the Aborigines. ‘All doubts are now removed …’ declared the Launceston Advertiser. ‘They have been murdered, barbarously murdered by the inhuman savages.’ The paper drew a harsh lesson:

Thus two more respectable and highly-respected individuals have been added to the list of those who have fallen victims to the barbarity of a race which no kindness can soften, and which nothing short of utter annihilation can subdue.²

The deaths deeply affected the settler community. It was a year since many of the men had participated in the Black Line, which had attempted to clear the hostile Aboriginal bands from the settled districts. The approach of spring held promise of renewed conflict, which it seemed nothing could subdue. Thomas was well known and admired. He had served in the British Army for ten years during the Napoleonic Wars and had fought with Bolivar in South America. He was known as one of the settlers who sought to develop friendly relations with the local Aboriginal bands. The Launceston Independent declared that the whole colony called aloud for retribution ‘deep and lasting not only upon the perpetrators of the deeds should they come within our power, but upon the whole race …’³

There were two distinctive features of the affair. The first was that the settlers did not appreciate at the time that Aboriginal resistance was at an end. Thomas and Parker were the last two victims of almost 250 killed. The other unusual feature of the situation was that the three Aborigines responsible for the killing were captured and taken to Launceston. A hurriedly assembled coroner’s jury was able to clearly establish their guilt. The question then was what would be done with them. Intense debate within the Launceston community led a settler to write one of the most important public documents about the relations between Aborigines and settlers to have appeared in the Australian colonies during the whole of the 19th century. The ‘Correspondent’ who signed himself ‘J.E.’⁴ began by declaring that his feelings prompted him to wish the ‘extermination of the Blacks’ but after more mature reflection on the subject some ‘solemn questions’ presented themselves. ‘Are these unhappy creatures’, he wondered:

the subjects of our king, in a state of rebellion? or are they an injured people, whom we have invaded and with whom we are at war? Are they within the reach of our laws; or are they to be judged by the law of nations? Are they to be viewed in the light of murderers, or as prisoners of war? Have they been guilty of any crime under the laws of nations which is punishable by death, or have they only been carrying on a war in their way? Are they British subjects at all, or a foreign enemy who has never yet been subdued, and which resists our usurped authority and dominion? [original emphases]

Many profound questions were thrown open by the Correspondent’s speculation, and there were no easy or comforting answers. Before all else was the question of warfare. How that was answered shaped everything else. He had no doubt about it and simply declared:

We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies – as invaders – as their oppressors and persecutors – they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore are they not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful possessions, which have been torn from them by force.

The Correspondent reminded his readers of contemporary attitudes to prisoners of war, who were not normally put to death for acts committed ‘in the field of battle’. But he demanded even more, calling for understanding and compassion:

What we call their crime is what in a white man we should call patriotism. Where is the man amongst ourselves who would not resist an invading enemy; who would not avenge the murder of his parents, the ill-usage of his wife and daughters, and the spoliation of all his earthly goods by a foreign enemy, if he had an opportunity? He who would not do so would be scouted, execrated, nay executed as a coward and a traitor; while he who did