History teaching in Australia is run by liars. Their agenda is marketing White Guilt in order to break our self confidence, to allow a flood of Third World aliens to take over, to cause Ethnic Fouling followed by Genocide. The propagandists are Zionist crazies and their Useful Idiots. There is more on the subject at The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Lies were not merely accidental; they were carried out deliberately, systematically, with malice aforethought.
From
Massacres In Australia Were Rare.
The History Wars From A Logical Perspective Rare
John Lewis
Perhaps because some of his defenders are now beginning to
doubt the viability of Reynolds’ figures, they have retreated to
the platitude that, for the relatives and friends of the victim,
one murder is a tragedy and it matters little if the figure is
2000 or 20,000. Others claim that Windschuttle does himself and
those who agree with him a disservice by having the temerity to
question Reynolds’ figures in such a crass and pitiless manner;
that the displacement and disenfranchisement of the black race
in Australia is an obvious reality of which we should all be
ashamed. Because both of these positions and the reaction in general
of Reynolds’ defenders are aimed at discouraging further debate
on the subject, a closer look at his claims is warranted. Also,
to contend that it matters little if the figure is 2000 or
20,000 is as absurd as claiming that it would matter little if
200 rather than 2000 are killed on our roads annually. Factors
of ten matter. When figures are entered into the history books
they become truths that are taught to our children. And truths
of this importance should not be determined by someone’s
ideology, or how they vote, or what they think of the prime
minister of the day. To avoid the political, ideological and emotional influences
that have corrupted the debate, Reynolds’ claims should be
investigated from a purely logical vantage. The question that
should be asked is, “In Australia during the nineteenth century
and the early part of the twentieth century, was it
realistically possible for white settlers, aided in part by the
authorities, to kill, or induce others to kill, some 20,000
blacks and largely conceal the fact?” The answer gleaned from a
truly objective appraisal of the evidence would be a resounding,
“No!” For Reynolds’ figure of 20,000-plus deaths to be anywhere
near correct, there would have to be some validity in the
often-repeated claims of those who defend this figure that
massacres of hundreds of blacks, often upwards of 300, occurred
from time to time in various parts of the country, and that
murders involving smaller numbers of victims were carried out
regularly throughout the period of pastoral expansion. One massacre that definitely did occur and received wide
coverage throughout the colony was in 1838 at Myall Creek, a
tributary of the Gwydir River in north-western New South Wales.
On a property owned by Henry Dangar, the former government
surveyor, twenty-eight Aborigines were rounded up by a group of
stockmen and hacked to death with cutlasses. The murderers were
all ex-convicts from Myall Creek and neighbouring stations, and
their victims were frail old men and women and some younger
women with children, including nursing babies, who had been
living near the homestead. Few of the natives were in a position
to offer any resistance. Nevertheless, as a precaution, the
murderers roped their victims together and led them to a gully
where any attempt to escape would be impeded before they went
about their grisly business. Afterwards they piled the bodies on
a pyre of logs and burnt them in a vain attempt to conceal the
crime. Once the authorities became aware of what had happened,
twelve men were arrested and, despite opposition from some
sections of the community, in particular members of the
so-called squattocracy including Dangar, seven of them were
eventually condemned to death and hanged. So, even in the early part of the nineteenth century, for
those who did take it upon themselves to murder blacks, the
killing of a relatively small group of defenceless old men,
women and children was not a simple matter. Despite the absence
of resistance it was still an extremely horrendous, noisy,
messy, odorous and, in light of the consequences, dangerous
business that proved impossible to conceal. The horror felt by
white witnesses and the resolution of the authorities to
prosecute the culprits support the contention that crimes of
this type, even during the early days of pastoral expansion,
were neither common nor tolerated. Perhaps more important to the
question of how many black deaths occurred during these times,
the difficulty of killing and disposing of even a small group of
defenceless people, coupled with the reactions of witnesses,
prosecutors and the public at large, casts extreme doubt on the
veracity of claims that individual massacres of upwards of 300
people occurred anywhere in the country. To put a figure of 300 violent deaths on a single occasion
into perspective, during the Gallipoli campaign at the Battle of
the Nek, where three waves of Anzacs charged across a narrow
strip of ground into continuous machine-gun fire and were cut
down almost to a man, the death toll was only slightly more than
this figure. Gullibility would need to be stretched to enormous
lengths for anyone to believe that similar numbers of black
deaths occurred in individual clashes with whites during a
period when the most sophisticated weapon was the Brown Bess
musket, which took over a minute to load and required riders to
dismount from their horses to load it. Also, for over 20,000
killings to have been committed, the equivalent of over 600
Myall Creek massacres, with all the associated horror, noise,
stench and recriminations would have had to occur and somehow
have been largely concealed by the perpetrators and ignored by a
population that revelled in exposing the failings of the
squattocracy. More importantly, the equivalent of over 600 Myall
Creek massacres would have had to be ignored by authorities who
had always demonstrated commendable zeal in prosecuting such
crimes. THE SIZE and distribution of the white population in
Australia also needs to be taken into account when testing the
veracity of Reynolds’ claims. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the population stood at a mere 5000, contained entirely
within the Sydney basin. By 1830 the population had risen to
70,000 and was still based mainly around Sydney with few
settlements outside the Sydney area containing populations above
100. During the 1830s pastoralists began to expand their
holdings further to the south and west from around the Bathurst
district, out onto the Liverpool plains from the upper reaches
of the Hunter Valley, and into all neighbouring areas from Port
Phillip. Although many of the outlying properties were larger
than 100,000 acres, rarely were they occupied by more than a
dozen stockmen. Dangar’s 50,000-acre property at Myall Creek,
for instance, had only four permanent employees. Putting aside for the moment the consequences of punitive
expeditions carried out by the authorities, the stockmen who
occupied these outlying properties were the only whites in the
colony who would have come into regular contact with natives in
the wild, so if mass killings did occur at this time stockmen
would have been primarily responsible. It was during this period
that the large pastoral holdings in the more temperate areas of
the continent were established. Because further land was held
back from settlement until the passing of the Land Act of 1861,
the white population on these properties would have been
relatively static and remained in the low thousands up until the
second half of the century when large tracts of Queensland were
also settled. Whether or not large-scale massacres had occurred, if as many
as half of these stockmen had taken part in the killing of
blacks and as few as half of Reynolds’ 20,000 victims had died
during this period, Australia at that time would still have
played host to more than 1000 killers each of whom, on average,
would have killed about ten people. Putting these figures into
perspective, the number of victims attributable to each man in
this veritable army of murderers would eclipse the murder
tallies of all but a handful of the better-known psychopaths who
carved out bloody reputations in America’s Wild West. If there
were fewer culpable whites, then their average murder tallies
would be higher; if there were more, then the country would have
hosted a larger army of murderers. If we accept Reynolds’
figures, there is no redeeming scenario. If the other half of
the 20,000 victims were killed during the latter part of the
nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century,
similar unlikely scenarios involving thousands more unpunished
murderers would have had to prevail in a period when crimes of
this nature would have been more difficult to conceal.
Gullibility again would need to be stretched to unacceptable
limits for anyone to believe that this is an accurate
description of our white forebears and the accepted ways of the
nation less than two hundred years ago. With regard to the
latter part of the period in question, we are talking about the
fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of people who are
alive today, men who would rarely be armed with anything more
lethal than a small clasp pocketknife secured in a leather
pouch. Punitive raids by the authorities in response to the murder
of whites and the spearing of stock did take place from time to
time. However, with the possible exception of Major Nunn’s
excursion into the Namoi and Gwydir areas early in 1838, up
until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when black
police were used in Queensland for this purpose, very few of
these activities resulted in large numbers of blacks ever being
encountered, let alone killed or apprehended. The vastness and nature of the Australian landscape were
major obstacles to punitive raids. Until late in the century a
thick carpet of forest extended from the east coast to well out
onto the western plains. On the plains, the banks of rivers and
billabongs were festooned with tall reeds and wild tangles of
coolabah, swamp oak and river gum roots. A guide to the
difficulty armed and mounted troopers or militia had in
apprehending blacks in any form of bushland setting can be seen
in the debacle in Tasmania in 1830 when a large portion of the
state was combed by a cordon of 5000 whites. The exercise took
seven weeks, cost £30,000 and resulted in the capture of only
two natives, an old man and a young boy. This failure reminds us which of the opponents in such
exercises had the advantage during those early days — and it was
not the landed gentleman recently from England’s South Downs or
similar climes or his mainly slum-bred ex-convict lackeys. It
was the so-called and sensibly-feared “Myall” or wild black. A
Myall would only ever be confused with his tame,
settlement-fringe-dwelling cousin at the peril of those
confused. Here was not the emaciated and disease-wracked mortal
who inspired misled chroniclers of those times to describe
Australian Aborigines as the most miserable race on earth. Here
instead was a tightly-muscled, coal-black, grey-striped
apparition who could cover fifty kilometres in a night and
completely disappear in broad daylight; someone who could bring
down a kangaroo in full flight at fifty paces and for whom a
mounted rider at one hundred was easy pickings; a skilled
adversary who knew to a heartbeat how long it took to reload a
horse pistol or musket. If any proof of his prowess is needed,
it is provided later in the century by the decision of
Queensland authorities to resort to the use of native police in
their attempts to subdue him and make life easier for those who
were moving into his domain. Multiple killings of blacks clearly did occur during some of
these punitive actions. But, even if the reported figures are
accurate, the total deaths across the entire continent would
still be numbered in hundreds, not thousands. Whereas there
would be some strength to the argument that killings by settlers
would be understated or denied, particularly after the Myall
Creek atrocity and its aftermath, it would be unlikely the same
would apply to authorised actions headed by military or police
commanders ever anxious to consolidate their positions and
attract increased resources. And it would be a unique breed of
trooper or militia-man who, when discussing his exploits, would
ever understate the number of adversaries he had faced during
violent encounters. An expedition headed by Major James Nunn of
the New South Wales Mounted Police in January 1838 provides some
guide to the unreliability of large death tolls reported in the
news sheets of those times and used by some people in these
times to open and worry wounds that seem to comfort them. IN RESPONSE to a request from settlers to curb the activities
of blacks in the north-west of the state, including the murder
of a number of stockmen, Nunn, accompanied by some thirty
troopers, spent several weeks in the Gwydir River area. There he
was involved in two bloody skirmishes with blacks in thick scrub
country on the banks of a large watercourse south-west of where
the town of Moree is now. In the first skirmish a trooper was
wounded and, according to Nunn, four blacks were killed in
retaliation. In the second, which occurred a short time later
when the troopers caught up with some of those fleeing through
the scrub from the first encounter, more blacks were shot and
killed. Nunn’s second-in-command, Lieutenant George Cobban,
claimed that, afterwards, he counted three or four more bodies. Subsequent estimates of the actual number killed and the
descriptions of what happened vary enormously. Some of the
troopers, perhaps attempting to regain face after being jeered
and laughed at earlier in their journey by blacks perched on
rocks high above where they were travelling, claimed they
disposed of upwards of forty warriors. For some time the figure
of forty deaths became the most quoted number by those who had
some connection or interest in the area or the event. But it was
a man who lived 500 kilometres to the south who perhaps had the
most influence on what many people now believe happened that
day. The Reverend
Lancelot Threlkeld
[ The
Wikipedia says he was a spendthrift sacked by the
London
Missionary Society for his pains. His fairy stories are not
mentioned. ] had a commendable record of
championing the rights of Aborigines and protesting against the
treatment many received at the hands of settlers and the
authorities. He also had a record for gross exaggeration. After
the Myall Creek massacre, which occurred a few months after
Nunn’s excursion into the same area, his accusations usually
included descriptions of women having their bellies ripped open
and children being roasted alive on a pyre of burning logs. When word of the killings during Nunn’s expedition reached
Threlkeld at his mission on Lake Macquarie, he immediately
reported that some 120 natives had been killed by a group
consisting of the mounted police and stockmen who had been
recruited to assist them. Shortly afterwards he amended the
death toll to be somewhere between 200 and 300, and finally to
the extinction of an entire tribe, including women and children,
whom he claimed had been forced into a swamp from where there
was no escape from the troopers’ guns. Closer investigation of these claims reveals a number of
weaknesses. Perhaps the most noticeable is that swamps of the
type found in the region — of which the Macquarie Marshes are a
good example — with their expanses of tall reeds and huge clumps
of marsh grasses, would provide more of a refuge than a trap to
anyone fleeing on foot from mounted troops. Also, it would be
extremely unlikely for troopers, after travelling some 400
kilometres from their home base and having already spent longer
away than originally expected, to be still carrying enough
powder and shot to kill the numbers mentioned, even assuming the
unlikely proposition that every shot found its mark and was
lethal. Almost certainly, several hundred blacks were not killed on
that day, either in the thick scrub that surrounded the swamp or
in the swamp itself. Both would have provided cover for the
blacks and impeded the activities of mounted troopers. And it is
illogical to believe that other bands of whites in other areas
of the continent could have carried out similar-sized crimes on
any other day. Even these days, bloody clashes involving the use
of mortars, grenades and automatic weapons rarely result in a
double-figure death toll, particularly in timbered or rough
terrain, and never in a triple-figure death toll unless heavy
aerial bombing or thousands of combatants are employed. The Major Nunn episode is known as the
Waterloo Creek
massacre on account of that name supposedly being bestowed on
the watercourse where the conflict took place. This raises the
obvious question of why either the authorities or the settlers
would apply the name of an enormous battle to the type of
activity they are trying to cover up. But, as the National
Museum of Australia can attest, myth is often worth much more
than reality when there is a particular point to make; hence
their inclusion of Bells Falls as a massacre site but not Myall
Creek. Bells Falls near Sofala [ mentioned in the
History wars ] is where we are told that in 1824,
after the murder of settlers in the area, a large number of
blacks were surrounded by whites and forced to jump to their
deaths. The mind can play freely with how many people might have
been forced over Bells Falls; but we know how many were killed
at Myall Creek and what happened afterwards, and neither an
exact number of black deaths nor the execution of white
murderers suits the theme of the exhibit. Nor does it seem to
matter to people of a particular mindset about our past that, as
with Waterloo Creek, the Bells Falls story unravels when
subjected to scrutiny. Most obviously, it would be highly unlikely that nervous
blacks would be camped where they would not have avenues of
escape if attacked, thereby ruling out being anywhere near the
top of a cliff. And it would have taken more armed whites than
could have been mustered in the entire colony at that time to
have surrounded a large number of blacks, driven them some
distance through thick scrub to the top of a waterfall and
successfully forced them over the side. If whites had attempted
such action anywhere in the country, it is interesting to
contemplate who would have been more likely to have ended up at
the bottom of a cliff when, to survive in the wild, most of the
male blacks would have been equipped with similar athletic
prowess to our modern-day Aboriginal footballers. The phrase
“pushed the blacks off a cliff” is easily uttered but it would
have been highly dangerous for the aggressors and almost
impossible to execute, which is perhaps why such claims in
relation to several of the more spectacular landmarks across the
continent are supported only by oral history and not one scrap
of hard evidence. THERE ARE some aspects of our nation’s past about which we
should not be proud, and our treatment of Aborigines over the
years is one of those. By the end of the nineteenth century,
introduced diseases and the inexorable expansion of white
settlement that pushed them out into the poorer parts of the
continent had greatly depleted their numbers. And there is
little consolation in the knowledge that much of the damage
inflicted on them resulted from well-intentioned but misguided
attempts to alleviate their suffering; prime examples of these
include the gathering together of the Tasmanian blacks in the
one camp where they were devastated by disease, and the
arbitrary removal by stuff-shirt officials of supposed at-risk
children from families across the entire continent. But the degree of our concern over past behaviour should not
be inflated by claims of deliberate genocide, or of killings
totalling the numbers claimed by
Henry
Reynolds. Such
accusations are illogical. Not enough of our white forebears
were so morally bankrupt, nor so many of our black forebears so
pitifully unable to defend themselves. Reynolds’ claims serve
only to infuriate those whose opinions differ from his, and do
nothing to enhance the self-respect of Aborigines or further the
processes of reconciliation. The good professor and his academic supporters should perhaps
take a short walk to visit those faculties of learning where
measurement must be precise and errors in the order of a factor
of ten or greater do not occur. And while there they should take
cognisance of the standards applied.
Printer Friendly Version
PROFESSOR Henry Reynolds contends that our white forebears
murdered over 20,000 of our black forebears.
Keith
Windschuttle
argues that this figure is grossly exaggerated, prompting a call
from academics and others for all men and women of good will to
rise against Windschuttle and bring him down. Curiously, those
who oppose Windschuttle appear to be more interested in
maintaining previously-held beliefs than in determining what
really happened, and do not seem to realise that figures of the
magnitude claimed by Reynolds arguably contain more insult to
our black than our white forebears.
John Lewis is a Sydney-based novelist and
screenwriter whose latest work is the historical
novel Savage Exile, published by Pan Macmillan.
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