The war we waged on our own soil

A statue of Yagan, a Noongar warrior from near Perth. Picture: Ian Cugley Source: Supplied

That’s because a concussed and bandaged Basil Fawlty, overcome with anxiety at having Germans in his restaurant, is the ideal symbol for the way settler-Australians have carried themselves for most of our past. We don’t want to talk about what happened after settlement. It’s too distasteful, too troubling.

Yet Cleese’s classic scene also reminds us of something else. When two peoples who have warred as bitterly as the Aborigines and the settler-Australians are forced to share each other’s company, forced to share living space, how are we supposed to react? Are we supposed to forget the unforgettable? What is the release valve for that anxiety?

One of the problems in the Australian context is we don’t have a name for the long slow process that unfolded after white arrival. Colonisation? To an extent, but that label has never fully explained the nature of the violence. Genocide? Perhaps, in certain times and places. Criminal activity? Only if you consider Aborigines to have been subjects under British law, which they certainly did not consider themselves to be. We’ve tried all these at one time or another, and found them wanting.

Reynolds’s big breakthrough in this matchless new work is to settle once and for all the question of what it was that occurred. It was, purely and simply, war. It was Australia’s Great War, the War at Home, an event that had profound consequences for the entire continent, exponentially more so than any of the overseas conflicts that we generally look at to define our national identity.

In fact, his argument for the centrality of the frontier war to Australian history is so compelling that it exposes as nonsense the very conception of our national identity. After all, how can we take seriously a discussion about Australian sacrifice that overlooks the one and only war fought on our soil?

For the most part, Forgotten War brings together the scholarship that has been taking place for several decades now, the re-evaluation of the colonial past that Reynolds helped to kick off when he wrote The Other Side of the Frontier (1981). It is a kind of state of the union address, meant to draw our attention to the bigger picture.

He shows, with less doubt than ever, that a consensus view of settlement history is indeed taking shape. The past decade in particular has seen several publications that reinforce each other: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck’s Out of the Silence, James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land, Robert Orsted-Jensen’s Frontier History Revisited, Jonathan Richards’s The Secret War and Tony Roberts’s extraordinary Frontier Justice. What Reynolds does so well is place in context many of these works, fit them together and draw conclusions that are startling, confronting and impossible to ignore.

The first conclusion he brings to light is that Aboriginal resistance to the intrusion of white settlers into sovereign territory was practically universal. Every part of the country saw violence resulting directly from the encroachment of settlers into Aboriginal land. Every part of the country experienced the war. As settlement spread outward from the population centres, settlers encountered each Aboriginal nation anew with the same results: carnage borne of the belief black land was there for the taking.

But while this process is by now well-established and commonly accepted, it has always raised a painful question, as Reynolds reminds us: “How did so many people who were nominally British subjects end up dead without having been arrested, charged, tried or sentenced and the circumstances of their deaths presented to a coroner?”

The answer lies in the nature of the conflict. For although we have been reluctant to label frontier violence as warfare, the options we are left with are equally unappealing. Reynolds writes: “If there was no war then thousands of Aborigines were murdered in a century-long, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government.”

This really is the crux of the matter for Reynolds. It was either unsanctioned bloodshed carried out by settlers or it was government-endorsed warfare fought to conquer Aboriginal resistance and claim the continent. What he urges us to remember is that, before the violence began, Aborigines lived according to traditional law. They had no access to British government services, to legal protection or to representation. To call them British subjects in the legal sense was surely nonsense.

In other words, until they were forcibly brought under settler control, they maintained sovereignty over their own land. Thus, Reynolds argues, warfare was the only sensible way to conceive of the situation that faced settlers: a war for control of territory; a war of nation against nation.

What’s more, classifying the frontier conflict as war has politically useful benefits. First, it is obvious that, as a conquered people, the Aborigines would retain the rights of ownership over the land. This, of course, was exactly what the Mabo and Wik cases showed: that as long as a connection to the land was maintained, then Aboriginal ownership continued. Second, war provides us with a template of how to behave. We memorialise the dead of both sides; we show respect for our adversaries; we strive to understand the causes and conditions that led to war to avoid a repeat. In short, we act as if our national honour is at stake, which, of course, it is.

The recasting of the frontier conflict as the War at Home has just begun. Nick Clements will publish his history of the Tasmanian frontier, Black War, later this year. Timothy Bottoms’s examination of violence in Queensland, Conspiracy of Silence, was reviewed in these pages recently by Nicolas Rothwell. There is sure to be more.

Reynolds has shown the way forward. Expect to hear the term “war” used more often in this context.

Forgotten War 
By Henry Reynolds
New South, 280pp, $29.99

Rohan Wilson is author of the award-winning frontier conflict novel The Roving Party.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-war-we-waged-on-our-own-soil/story-fn9n8gph-1226689621728