Culture That Buried Babies in Sand Up to Neck

History

Massacres: The frontier violence that's hard to have

Hundreds of massacres left thousands of Aboriginal people dead, a history many Australians struggle to accept. A brave few started documenting what happened.

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Selected statistics

65,180
Number of Ancient Australians historians estimate were killed in Queensland from the 1820s until the early 1900s. [one]
97%
Percentage of of people killed in the massacres who were Aboriginal men, women and children. [ii]
500
Estimated number of massacres by settlers of Aboriginal people in Australia. [three]
<10
Estimated number of massacres by Aboriginal people of settlers in Australia. [three]
20
Number of "very modest, concrete memorials to Aboriginal massacre sites beyond Commonwealth of australia". [3]
9
Number of known cases of deliberate poisoning of flour given to Ancient people. [four]
25:1
Ratio at which Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory were killed compared to white settlers from 1870s to 1900. [5]
12:1
Ratio at which Ancient people of Victoria were killed compared to white settlers from the 1800s. [5]
44:1
Ratio suggested by collaborative academic research. [1]
1794
Year in which mass killings were first carried out in Australia. [iv]
1928
Year in which massacres are thought to have ceased. [2]
27
Average number of Aboriginal people killed in massacres in NSW and Victoria between 1834 and 1859. [4]
34
Average number of Aboriginal people killed in massacres in Queensland between 1859 and 1915. [4]

Massacres: The horrors of borderland violence

Whatever invasion of a country with an existing ethnic population seems to exist inevitably linked with a long list of massacres on its indigenous peoples, and Australia is no exception. Near all Ancient nations experienced massacres, [6] and nearly every Aboriginal community has a massacre story. [7]

Definition: Massacre

What is a 'massacre'? According to historians, a massacre is the "indiscriminate killing of 6 or more undefended people" over a express menstruation of time and with careful planning. [3]

Academics say the massacres of Ancient people were conducted in secrecy and very few perpetrators were brought to justice (the Myall Creek massacre is a notable exception). And they were planned in advance, "designed to eradicate the opposition". [6]

The number of Aboriginal people killed in retaliation of European deaths are off the scale. Amidst the near shocking is the Jack Smith massacre (Warrigal Creek, Victoria) in 1843, where about 150–170 Brataualang people were killed over 5 days in retaliation for the killing of one single person—Ronald Macalister, the nephew of a local squatter. [six] It'southward an atrocity which historians constitute fitting the criteria of 'genocidal massacre.' [iii]

Aboriginal people had little chance of surviving. Their spears, clubs and hatchets had to fight swords, pistols, muskets, double-barrelled shotguns, rifles, carbines and bayonets, among other items.

The survivors were oft used as slaves.

Research of Guardian Commonwealth of australia and the University of Newcastle found that some of the most violent episodes in Australia's colonial past took identify well into the 1920s, in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In some cases, Ancient people were forced to collect woods for their own pyres. [2]

The inquiry likewise found that authorities forces, including soldiers, constabulary, magistrates and native police, were involved in more than than half of all massacres recorded between the 1820s and the 1930s. Massacres became more than tearing, systematic and calculated over time.

The death of a civilian was the most mutual trigger for a massacre, followed by "opportunity" attacks. The majority of massacres was planned with authorities involvement or sanction. "There'southward e'er constabulary involved in the story, correct across Australia," knows Prof Lyndall Ryan, who led the University of Newcastle research team. [two]

Accepting history

Australians are slowly coming to terms with their history of massacres. Many perpetrators kept silent for decades fearing abort or retribution. Aboriginal survivors feared they'd be killed as well if they spoke. It seems this is function of "The Great Australian Silence" in our history.

But since the Uluru Statement of the Heart, and many individuals, called for more truth-telling in Australia the attitude towards this night history is shifting.

"We then don't talk about that [massacre history] here in this state, but it's a real shared history that a lot of people don't know about," explains former AFL star Adam Goodes. "If we want to reconcile every bit a nation we have to sympathize where we came from and how we got to where we are today." [8]

No wild beast of the forest was e'er hunted down with such unsparing perseverance every bit they [Ancient people] are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can exist met.

— Henry Meyrick, squatter, in a letter of the alphabet to his family in England in 1846 [iv]

The whites appear to have acted with great moderation.

— Magistrate comment on hearing that William Carter had killed an Aboriginal family, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child at Mt Bryan, South Australia, in 1844. [two]
A map of Australia shows massacre sites mainly in the north, east and southeast of Australia.
The map shows the location of massacres where six or more people died between 1794 and 1928. Circles are sized by the estimated number of deaths. Source: The Guardian

Why did the massacres happen?

Settlers killed Aboriginal people for many reasons [5]:

  • Reprisals for murder. Later Ancient people attacked European people, search parties retaliated ferociously.
  • Theft. Massacres in reprisal for the killing or theft of horses, livestock or property are second just to reprisals for murder of a settler. [4]
  • Struggle for land. Stockmen often led cattle to graze well beyond the limits of a station as areas needed time to recover.
  • Lack of communication. Because the colonists didn't speak Aboriginal languages, and very few tried, they couldn't learn near Aboriginal people's culture or settle disputes.
  • No reason. Sometimes colonists attacked for no rational reason. It could just be that the opportunity arose, or the cheekiness of the person, e.yard. for being "found standing in the moonlight in the doorway of [a squatter's] hut". [5]
  • Fear of attacks. The invaders were afraid that Aboriginal people who were painted for important ceremonies were in fact performing state of war dances and would after attack.
  • Sexual gratification. Initially there was an over-population of male person Europeans. Some sought to remove all Aboriginal males and then that they could sexually abuse their women and girls.

White settlers oftentimes found no reason to spare Aboriginal men and boys. Aboriginal girls and women, however, were often kept for sexual pleasure. Inquiry uncovered "stories of girls as young as eight who were kidnapped and raped and infected with syphilis. Teenage girls were kept for sex activity and chained up at night to stop them running away. I grouping of girls was held in a craven wire enclosure". [five]

No wonder that Aboriginal people refer to massacre sites every bit "taboo site[south] of trauma". [3]

The legacy of massacres withal impacts Aboriginal people today. With missing parts of family trees due to massacres many don't know who they are or where they're from. [iii]

Cartoon of a teacher pointing to a slide about Captain Cook and the words: 'When I was at school we weren't taught about the massacres and the frontier wars. There was the occasional reference to someone spearing a white explorer or farmer, but it was all just about Cook.'
Schools rarely teach about the horrors of Australia's history, and this includes massacres. The above is an extract from a 'Get-go Dog on the Moon' cartoon by The Guardian Australia that highlighted how niggling of this history was, and is, taught. [nine]

There's sure roads people won't drive along. It's not simply felt past Ancient people merely by non-Ancient people as well.

— Aleshia Lonsdale, Wiradjuri creative person [3]

It's not history that you lot necessarily want to embrace merely information technology's a really important take a chance between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people for truth telling.

— Steve Kinnane, Miriuwung human being and First Nations researcher [10]

Story: Blackness massacre memories

"My female parent would sit and cry and tell me this; they cached our babies in the ground with simply their heads above the footing. All in a row they were. Then they had tests to see who could kick the babies' head off the furthest. One man clubbed a babe's head off from horseback.

They then spent the rest of the day raping the women, most of whom were and then tortured to death by sticking sharp things like spears up their vaginas till they died.

They tied the men's easily backside their backs, then cut off their penis and testicles and watched them run effectually screaming until they died. They killed in other bad ways too." [11]

Story: They carried their ticket to die

In 1924, according to oral history passed downwards by survivors, a group of Gija and Worla men were convicted of killing a bullock at Bedford Downs station (southern Kimberley region, WA).

They were sent back to the station with "tickets" around their necks as a label of their guilt. Some removed the tickets before they reached the station, others left them on.

When they arrived, those who all the same had their tickets on were sent to a remote expanse to chop wood. After spending the morning chopping wood, they were given food poisoned with strychnine, causing them to die painfully. Their bodies were and then burned.

Two men who refused to eat escaped. They, along with two women who had as well witnessed the killings, passed on this story. [two]

Where did the massacres occur?

There are hundreds of sites all over Australia, only finding them commonly takes a lot of detective work. Massacres might take been mentioned in the media only in passing, by the boisterous perpetrators in the pub, or not at all. Researchers rely on settler diaries, newspaper reports, and Aboriginal prove to create a list.

The Academy of Newcastle's online mapping project aims to document as many massacres equally possible, compiling settler diaries, testimonies from survivors, and newspaper articles from the time. Later on iv years, in July 2017, it had captured 150 massacres resulting in at to the lowest degree half-dozen,000 deaths, [6] reflecting how difficult information technology is to discover and verify each incident. By the end of 2021, the number of massacres had more than doubled to 311. [10]

By the time the project is completed researches expect to notice that nearly 15,000 people were killed in massacres (divers as where 6 people or more died). This doesn't include smaller attacks, which have been estimated by some academics to bring the death cost to more than thirty,000 from 1788 until the 1940s. [6]

Some better known massacre sites include Myall Creek, Waterloo Creek, Coniston, Appin, Barefaced Rock, Slaughterhouse Creek, Pinjarra and Woodford Bay.

A 1914 letter to the editor of the Northern Star, a paper published on the NSW northward coast, gives you some insight into what was going on: [12]

"Also the Myall Creek massacre in that location were other and greater massacres perpetrated … for niggling offences, and sometimes for no substantial reason at all. The whites had a method of seeking retribution that was a disgrace to Christianity – that of punishing a tribe, probably an innocent 1, for the criminal offense of an individual. The whites, far from showing any regard for the lives of the original owners of the land, ignored all their rights every bit to holding, and yet were most brutal when their own rights were transgressed."

Today massacre sites are on private land, or mining properties; others are at the lesser of reservoirs, considering then many of the massacres happened at campsites shut to creeks. [three]

Australia's place names are also giveaway evidence of frontier massacres: Murderers Flat, Massacre Inlet, Murdering Gully, Haunted Creek, Butchery Gully, Niggers Bounce.

When I visit Aboriginal communities today the first thing they do is take you to the massacre site.

— Prof Lyndall Ryan, historian, University of Newcastle [vi]

Aboriginal people killing Aboriginal people

Most people associate massacres in Australia with Europeans killing Ancient people. But there were besides instances where Aboriginal people killed other Ancient people, for instance Native Mounted Police.

Queensland's Native Mounted Constabulary operated from the belatedly 1840s until nearly 1904. It was Australia's longest-running Native Police. [xiii] White officers commanded groups of nigh six or seven Aboriginal trackers. The goal was elementary: to move Aboriginal people off the land the European colonists wanted, often by forcefulness and ofttimes violently, and to protect and support the settlers.

There'south just one reason that the Native Police were there — to kill Aboriginal people and to facilitate the theft of country.

— Bryce Barker, archeologist and chief investigator on a Native Police research project [13]

Fact

Historians guess that Queensland'due south Native Mounted Constabulary was responsible for the deaths of betwixt 24,000 and 41,000 Aboriginal people. [13]

While acting nether the command of white superiors, most of the men responsible for these massacres where Aboriginal. [13] They were hired from areas far abroad from the regions where the killings occurred to avoid that they were related to their victims, and to forestall them from running abroad.

Some young Aboriginal men volunteered to join, possibly to survive or after losing their family and land to the advancing invasion.

Today the descendants of Aboriginal trackers and troopers wrestle with this by. "It'southward very heartbreaking," offers Yulluna woman Hazel Sullivan whose grandfather organised killings. "It's like having a murderer in your family." [13]

But rather than feeling aback and aroused, most concord that their priority is for Australians to properly acknowledge the history of Queensland's Native Police and its brutal impact on Aboriginal people – a truth-telling, which is one of the key messages of the Uluru Statement From the Heart.

Finding testify of these murders is hard equally Ancient people frequently disposed of the bodies with traditional burial rituals and not mass graves. Just one piece of physical evidence of the Native Mounted Police is their army camp sites.

"What nosotros shortly realised was [that] Queensland native police set upwardly base camps all over Queensland," says Professor Bryce Barker, an archaeological anthropologist from the University of Southern Queensland, and 1 of the leaders of a enquiry project investigating the evidence of Native Mounted Law life. "Looking at the record, we were able to institute that there were over 200 of these [camp sites] established at various times across Queensland." [seven]

The Police occupied sites for equally long as the conflict took to suppress – some for only a few months, a few for a menses of more than 20 years. Archaeologists found items such as bullets from government-issued guns or compatible buttons, proving the being of Native Mounted Law camps. [7]

Writing books and talking about it would be a good healing process for Australia.

— Vince Harrigan, traditional custodian, Balnggarrawarra people [13]

The Waterloo massacre

Sketch of the Waterloo Massacre.
Contemporary sketch of the Waterloo massacre. Note the firecrackers exploding in the background while white men shoot Aboriginal people.

The Waterloo massacre occurred 50 kilometres due south-west of Moree (380 kilometres south-west of Brisbane), on Waterloo Creek (what is known today as Millie Creek [14]) on Commonwealth of australia Twenty-four hour period (26 Jan) 1838, a few months before the massacre at Myall Creek.

NSW policeman Major James Nunn and around 30 mounted soldiers and stockmen combed the Gwydir region on an trek to suppress Aboriginal people.

They committed a series of atrocities in the area, but the Waterloo Creek massacre was the most savage.

Five white men were killed, but between 120 and 300 Aboriginal people of the Kamilaroi nation were shot by Major Nunn [15], making information technology the maybe the largest single massacre in Commonwealth of australia.

The exact details will never be known as there are no official records and but unreliable accounts from the perpetrators who were scared of prosecution after the murderers of Myall Creek were punished.

The Kamilaroi customs in Moree officially commemorates the anniversary of the massacre since 2013. [16]

The Coniston Massacre

The Coniston Massacre happened in 1928 at Baxters Well, about 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, after the murder of dingo scalper Frederick Brookes at Yurrkuru (formerly known equally Coniston Station or Brooks Creek) [17].

Brookes was killed by an Aboriginal human named Bullfrog (traditional name Japanangka), who it is believed was angry that his wife was staying with Brookes.

Lawman George Murray led reprisal parties against Aboriginal people over a wide area between Baronial and Oct 1928. During attacks more than 30 Ancient people were killed, but unofficial estimates, for example by the the National Museum of Australia, put the number at more than than 60, and Aboriginal people estimate 170 were killed. [4]

Many more than Aboriginal people fled the area, never to render. Bullfrog hid in a cave and was never captured by Murray'south political party [17].

80 years later on a memorial commemorates the massacre, congenital by Aboriginal volunteers. The Coniston massacre is often referred to as Australia's last state-sanctioned mass killing.

In August 2018, NT Constabulary Commissioner Reece Kershaw laid at wreath and apologised for what happened. "At that place was no excuse or justification for what occurred here xc years ago," he said in a oral communication at Yurrkuru. "Equally a constabulary officer and commissioner I'grand sorry for what has occurred." [18]

Nosotros're non biting. We merely desire everybody to know and to acknowledge this black spot in Australian history. This is what they call hallowed ground, similar Gallipoli is for white fellas.

— Geoff Shaw, Kaytetye man, during the opening of the memorial [17]

Video: Coniston Massacre

View a short student assignment video almost the massacre:

Tasmania's Black State of war

As the Tasmanian colony expanded on Ancient people's homelands, the horrifically trigger-happy Black State of war bankrupt out between 1824 and 1831 in the eastern part of the island. Self-appointed parties tracked Aboriginal people's campfires and ambushed them, murdering as many as possible. White settlers were attacked and brutally killed, too, their homes raided and burnt, sheep and cattle speared. [19]

The war claimed the lives of 223 colonists, merely as historian Nicholas Clements writes in his 2014 book, The Black War, it "annihilated" the Aboriginal population. He believes sixty% of the Beginning Nations people in the war zone lost their lives. "Nowhere else in Australia did and so much borderland violence occur in such a pocket-size area over such a short catamenia," he writes.

Eventually, the eastern Tasmanian survivors of the colony'due south violence and introduced disease – fewer than 100 – were resettled on Flinders Island, off Tasmania'south north-eastward declension. But losing their country broke the heart of many and they apace died in the years following.

Origin of the term 'genocide'

Tasmaniann Nuenonne woman Truganini was long considered as "the last of her race" and came to be used as a instance report by Raphaƫl Lemkin who coined the term 'genocide' in 1944.

To that finish, the Tasmanian Blackness War contributed to the cosmos of the term, and the United nations conventions against it. [19]

A list of massacres on Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal massacres in Australia. [twenty] Many more than massacres occurred than those listed. The website Australian Frontier Conflicts shows them by country or territory and on a map.

Calling for information on Pilbara massacres

The Wangka Maya Pilbara Ancient Language Centre in S Hedland seeks data, stories or recollections about Pilbara massacres.

Delight contact the center on (08) 9172 2344.

References

View article sources (20)

[1] [1a] 'Why the number of Indigenous deaths in the frontier wars matters', The Guardian xv/7/2014
[ii] [2a] [2b] [2c] [2d] [2e] 'Forced to build their ain pyres: dozens more Aboriginal massacres revealed in Killing Times enquiry', The Guardian 18/eleven/2019
[3] [3a] [3b] [3c] [3d] [3e] [3f] [3g] [3h] 'The Mapping of Massacres', The New Yorker, 6/12/2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres, retrieved 29/ane/2018
[4] [4a] [4b] [4c] [4d] [4e] [4f] 'The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Commonwealth of australia must confront', The Guardian 4/3/2019
[5] [5a] [5b] [5c] [5d] 'Skeletons are out', The Age, ii/7/2005 ('Frontier Justice' by Tony Roberts)
[6] [6a] [6b] [6c] [6d] [6e] 'Mapping Aboriginal massacres makes information technology time to recognise the colonial wars, say leading historians', Latrobe Valley Express, 6/7/2017
[vii] [7a] [7b] 'Australia'due south savage colonial past unearthed beyond Queensland', ABC News 25/9/2018
[8] 'Story fourth dimension', Sunday Herald, Sunday Life, p. 10, 21/11/2021
[9] 'When we were in school, we didn't learn most the massacres – Get-go Dog on the Moon', The Guardian eight/iii/2019
[10] [10a] 'Colonial Frontier Massacres researchers add dozens of sites to map of Ancient killings', ABC News 18/11/2019
[eleven] 'Massacres to Mining: The Colonisation of Ancient Australia', January Roberts, 1981, p.xix
[12] 'There are few memorials to Australia'south bloody history but that's changing', The Guardian 5/3/2019
[13] [13a] [13b] [13c] [13d] [13e] 'Coming to terms with the brutal history of Queensland's Native Mounted Police', ABC News 24/seven/2019
[xiv] 'The Encyclopaedia of Commonwealth of australia's Battles', Chris Coulthard-Clark, 2001, p.12 (books.google.com.au/books?id=DLz6LJBgYHcC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=waterloo+creek+moree&source=web&ots=s848SwS_4m&sig=O-btdKH877bBMkoRHVfrx0xCcNM&hl=en&sa=10&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result)
[15] 'Commonwealth of australia Twenty-four hour period massacre swept under the mat', SMH, 25/1/1988
[16] 'Mourning in Moree: Why 1 customs can't celebrate on Australia Day', SMH 24/one/2020
[17] [17a] [17b] 'Memorial unveiled', Koori Mail 433 p.34
[18] 'Coniston Massacre: NT police apologise for state-sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people', ABC News 24/8/2018
[19] [19a] ''Thank you lot for the genocide': the Aboriginal activist 'love-bombing' white leaders', SMH 22/two/2021
[20] Aboriginal News, www.facebook.com/AboriginalNewsAustralia/photos/a.135977603238992.27790.134554043381348/422006967969386/, retrieved 21/4/2015

Cite this page

Korff, J 2022, Massacres: The frontier violence that's hard to take, <https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/massacres-the-frontier-violence-thats-hard-to-accept>, retrieved 14 March 2022

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