David Marr’s history and family saga is a timely exercise in truth-telling about the killing of the Indigenous population in Queensland and elsewhere.
In the early years of this century, Keith Windschuttle produced two volumes of a projected trilogy,, which became central to the history wars of the era. The first, published in 2002, purported to show that the colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land was a relatively peaceful affair. The numbers killed in frontier violence, he argued, were far fewer than historians had claimed.Volume three in the trilogy claimed to demonstrate that the Stolen Generations were a myth.
Killing Aboriginal people became a family business when Reg, Edmund’s son, established a career as an officer in the Native Mounted Police. Younger brother D’arcy, also in this force for a time, and rather more wild and more famous, was celebrated as a cheeky and hard-living larrikin of the type Australians are said to love.
Marr shows that colonists evolved a discreet system for clearing Aboriginal people from their land through slaughter without incurring serious risk of interference by the authorities. Indeed, the vague instructions issued by British-appointed governors and, later, elected colonial governments about what was and was not permissible gave something close to carte blanche to white vigilantes and Aboriginal “police” charged with keeping order.
Marr suggests that after the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, that saw the execution of some of the killers of Aboriginal women and children, colonists adapted. Some turned to poisoning, which would be nearly impossible to trace and punish. Colonists also became more discreet, establishing what Marr calls “a curious but brutally effective omertá … a code that let so much be written in the papers about massacres but saw nothing done about them in the courts”.
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