July 5, 2017, was the date that the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project created by the University of Newcastle’s Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ team of researchers went live.
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It was a momentous event. An event that began to push back at the great Australian silence.
The silence that for generations had allowed the true history of the early settlement of this country to slip into the shadows, to be consigned to the deep recesses of memories, to be conveniently and deliberately forgotten.
The online digital map details the many massacre sites that dot our country — massacres that were a defining strategy to contain and eliminate the active resistance of the many Aboriginal peoples across this vast continent.
These ‘Frontier Wars’, as they have become known, continued until the 1920s and led to the deaths of many thousand Aboriginal men, women and children.
The map also details the corroborating evidence for these events.
Only those events that could be verified were included.
At the launch, University of Newcastle historian Professor Lyndall Ryan, speaking about the importance of the project, said: “Most massacres took place in secret and were designed to not be discovered, so finding evidence of them is a major challenge.
“This digital tool brings significant historical information out of the depths of archives, bringing it to life in an accessible and visual format.
“With this map we’ve developed a template to identify massacres and a process to corroborate disparate sources.
“They include settler diaries, newspaper reports, Aboriginal evidence and archives from state and federal repositories.
“The map pulls the sources together to form a coherent list of frontier massacres spanning 80 years across eastern Australia.”
Back in 1879, George Robertson published the Australian Dictionary of Dates and Men of the Time and included a section ‘Aborigines — Outrages Against’, detailing 18 incidents where Aboriginal people were killed by settlers.
Letters such as that sent by Bob McCracken to his sister Mattie in 1885, describing a massacre at Calvert Downs in the Gulf Country, underscored the violence that was happening.
Mr McCracken wrote: “Killing odd ones or even twos or threes is no good, they are never missed and nothing but wholesale slaughter will do any good.”
There is even a letter published in the newspaper, the South Australian Register, written by Patrick Cahill, where he describes a massacre, saying: “I don’t know how many I shot, I didn’t stop to count them”.
Mr Cahill was later made Protector of Aborigines.
As the research team extended the work to include South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the dots started to fill in across the country.
Each colonial frontier massacre mapped, represented the ‘deliberate and unlawful killing of six or more undefended people in one operation’.
It applied to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as well as colonists.
In a recent article in The Guardian, Dr Robyn Smith, who has spent the past four years researching colonial violence in the Northern Territory, described the level of lawlessness of the frontier.
With vast distances providing protection from scrutiny by officials, pastoralists and overland telegraph officers regularly “took the law into their own hands”.
“Technically, massacres were not sanctioned but there was tacit approval and certainly police participation. The Northern Territory was a large place, sparsely populated and governed from distant Adelaide.
“Later, it was governed from more distant Canberra.
“There were very few police on the ground to protect the nervous settlers and the land they were progressively plundering.”
As Prof Ryan commented earlier: “The more research I do, the more dumbfounded I am by the amount of violence and brutality that actually took place.’’
So how does all the information gathered by the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project play out today?
In addition to providing information about the extent of the frontier violence, there is the disturbing, critical finding that half of the frontier massacres of Aboriginal people were carried out by government forces — including police.
Paul Daley, writing in The Guardian recently, noted that this finding “reinforces how contemporary Indigenous deaths at the hands of state law enforcement agencies are part of a history of violence that began with European invasion in 1788”.
For the many First Nations people, especially those in the Territory, these events are not just family memories passed down through the generations, they are haunting, violent experiences from the past that are still playing out today.
It is not difficult to see how the ongoing trauma felt by First Nations people today coupled with the distrust and fear of police and authorities is linked to this history.
The massacre map provides us with a different lens to view our history.
It provides us with an opportunity to stop the denial of the reality of the settlement of this country, to stop the silence.
Yes, it’s confronting, not how we believed this country was settled.
But as the Massacre Map Project can show us, it is the reality that has been silenced for too long.
Now is the time for us to be brave and to acknowledge our real shared history.
This year’s National Reconciliation Week theme, Be Brave Make Change, encourages us all to be brave and tackle the unfinished business of reconciliation so we can make change for the benefit of all Australians.
Visiting the University of Newcastle’s website is a good place to start.
So be brave and learn about the real history of our frontiers and how settlement happened.
Then make change in how you think and acknowledge the misdeeds of the past and the implications of this history of violence today and the action you can take to stop the ongoing violence that is still happening today.
Visit https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres
Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group