Violence and cover-up in the taking of Aboriginal land
Slaughter on stolen lands, The Age, August 10, 2013 Review By Raymond Evans of . “FORGOTTEN WAR”, by Henry Reynolds
While we remember our casualties in overseas wars, no toll exists for Aboriginal deaths during the brutal colonisation of Australia.
“……the kind of paradox that Reynolds gamely wrestles with throughout this closely argued account. For the past 40 years, in a succession of such volumes, he has continued to wrestle with it, approaching it from those two peripheries of the Australian imagination, Queensland and Tasmania, and coming closer and closer each time to pinning it to the mat. Patiently, and with admirable, indomitable energy, he keeps informing the Australian public of things they need to know, but which many of them do not wish to hear.
What he is now basically saying is: Forget the so-called history wars. They represent a hollow, media-driven campaign to deny the undeniable. Focus instead on the war for Australia: that is, the extended and bloody destruction of Aboriginal first nations across almost 150 years of frontier strife – the utter territorial dispossession of perhaps as many as 1 million people, and a unilateral assumption of their sovereignty, accomplished with swaths of escalating violence.
This was, as Reynolds writes, ”one of the greatest appropriations of land in world history”, unmatched elsewhere in speed and scale. It is the basis of every leaven of prosperity in Australia today. An accompanying ”progressive transfer of sovereignty” was equally a blatant ”transaction of global significance”.
It was ”a double usurpation” of both the right to exercise authority over one’s territory and of customary title to land. What was done here, in short, was anomalous and ”manifestly not consonant with international law or the practice of nations at the time”. It was, Reynolds claims, ”an outrage, a violation of international usage, the assertion of a monstrous principle”.
No wonder, then, that it led dually to such degrees of violence and cover-up. Continue reading
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