Writing on the subject of the massacre of Indigenous Australians in the wake of the European colonisation of Australia, journalists with The Guardian Australia have recently claimed that ‘The truth of Australia’s history has long been hiding in plain sight. The stories of “the killing times” are the ones we have heard in secret, or told in hushed tones. They are not the stories that appear in our history books yet they refuse to go away.’

In a series titled The Killing Times, journalists are aiming ‘to assemble information necessary to begin truth telling — not just the grim tally of more than a century of frontier bloodshed, but its human cost — as told by descendants on all sides. This is the history we have all inherited.’

A dramatic centrepiece of the series is a massacre map. This is in fact largely the work of Prof. Lyndall Ryan and her team at the University of Newcastle, who have been undertaking this research — Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930 — with the support of the Australian Research Council, AIATSIS, and The Wollotuka Institute for a number of years. Their website and map is available here. This important project has received a good deal of media attention in the past, and I understand that Prof. Ryan has been enthusiastic to see it receive more coverage.

Despite this, there are some issues that I want to raise with The Guardian’s series. They are not special to this instance, but The Killing Times reportage offers the chance to clarify some key points, namely that the history of frontier massacres hasn’t been hidden, that understanding how these histories are written is important, and that ‘truth-telling’ is about more than having a broad understanding of this history.

These Histories Aren’t Hiding

The first problem is the idea that these are ‘untold histories’. It’s worth emphasising: The history of frontier massacres in Australia has been extensively researched and written about; these histories have not been hidden away; and, asking ‘Why weren’t we told?’ is a fundamentally flawed question.

This is not merely about stamping out intellectual ground: Ignoring or dismissing this body of literature leads to some of the more important problems I will discuss later on.

The historiographical and archival grounding of Prof. Ryan’s project alone (seventeen pages of bibliographic sources are available here) is enough to dismiss any assertion that the stories of frontier massacres ‘are not the stories that appear in our history books’. Beyond the academic literature, there are also numerous popular trade books on the subject. That one hasn’t read this material, or teachers have not incorporated it into their lessons on Australian history, or students don’t listen in class, or Australians just don’t care, or any other reason or excuse for lack of exposure to this work, good or bad, are different issues entirely.

It is also inaccurate to describe work on frontier violence as ‘academic’ in the pejorative sense. These materials are not hidden or obscure; frequently, due to their subject matter, they are written by scholars with an uncommon desire to see their work read and discussed in public. One might argue that people who claim these stories don’t appear in history books don’t mean actual history books, but given the dichotomy between ‘books’, ‘what we learnt in school’, and so on, and ‘what we know but don’t acknowledge’ so common in this sort of discussion, that seems unlikely. Paul Daley provides a decent survey of some of these histories and historians that don’t exist in a column accompanying The Killing Times.

The argument that stories of frontier massacres are ‘the ones we have heard in secret, or told in hushed tones’ will also be difficult to accept for anyone who teaches Australian history, or anyone who remembers the History Wars, which revolved substantially around the issue of colonial violence, its extent, and its political meaning, and involved high profile media and political voices along with academic historians. Daley’s long-running column for The Guardian regularly draws on the work of historians and brings it to a wider audience.

There is also embedded in this subject a misreading of William Stanner’s 1968 ‘great Australian silence’ regarding the post-European Indigenous experience. Stanner’s words have popularly been taken to mean that no one really wrote or spoke about frontier violence, and perhaps even that there has been a conspiracy to silence these stories. But as Anna Clark notes, among other scholars to have considered this, the story is rather more complicated. While there is always room for expanding the research and public knowledge of the history, there was much written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about Indigenous Australia, and on frontier violence.

In the nineteenth century there were no doubts among Europeans about the extent and viciousness of violence on the Australian frontier. It was well understood by pastoralists that Aboriginal Australians would need to be removed from the land. Niel Black, a squatter in western Victoria, advised in 1839 that:

The best way [to acquire land] is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means — sometimes by wholesale…

Black himself was unwilling to slaughter Aboriginal people, and instead purchased a property where the slaughter had already occurred — Fred Taylor’s Glenormiston run.

Historians in the nineteenth century recognised violence as the corollary of pastoral expansion in the colonial era. Without hesitation, John West observed in his 1852 History of Tasmania:

The smoke of a fire was the signal for a black hunt. The sportsmen having taken up their positions, perhaps on a precipitous hill, would first discharge their guns, then rush towards the fires, and sweep away the whole party. The wounded were brained; the infant cast into the flames; the musket was driven into the quivering flesh; and the social fire, around which the natives gathered to slumber, became, before morning, their funeral pile.

Ernest Scott’s 1916 A Short History of Australia even remarked: ‘The evidence is conclusive that the wrong-doing was on the side of the whites … It was but natural that the aboriginals should at length turn upon their oppressors … The revenges which they took did but increase the number of those who shed their blood. Black hated white, and white thirsted for the blood of black. But the whites had the better weapons. Waddies and spears were no match for muskets. Blacks were shot in groups, as they bathed or sat round their camp-fires at night.’ Scott’s book went through multiple editions; my own is from the 1960s.

The trope that this history was, eventually, covered up, is easy to believe. I myself have written that ‘Indigenous Australians were written out of history, and so was the brutality of colonisation. Aboriginal communities had never forgotten the violence, of course. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that the conspiracy of silence broke and academics finally turned their minds to frontier violence.’ This framing was, with hindsight, too simplistic. The material was there on bookshelves and in archives: it was up to us to read it and understand what it meant. It has become too easy to excuse this lack of knowledge by reference to what has or hasn’t been handed to us as schoolchildren; I am constantly disappointed that people with an interest in Indigenous Australian history and Indigenous rights haven’t been interested enough to seek out information on their own. As Ben Eltham said to me, ‘it’s really an index of how little we pay attention to professional history and historians in this country’.

History Isn’t Easy

The second issue relates to the first: While many writers regularly claim the mantle of historian, this is one subject area where rigour, expertise, and care really matter. Doing one’s homework is not merely a professional obligation in this case, but an ethical one too. As I’ll discuss below, getting this history right is important for the truth-telling process that has emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. And it’s not just about facts; it’s about how the facts are framed and in what context they are embedded.

Historians working on the Australian history of colonisation currently emphasise work that centres Aboriginal people and Aboriginal points of view in history, and regularly focus on the ‘survival of an autonomous indigenous world’, rather than telling a story purely of destruction and dispossession.

Furthermore, there has been a focus on complex, local stories as opposed to monolithic national narratives. ‘Although doubt has been cast on the validity and usefulness of national historiography itself’, wrote Aboriginal History journal founder Bob Reece in 1987, ‘there still seems to be a naïve need to generalise about “the Australian experience”’.

There is a conviction that the histories of Indigenous-settler relations were significantly more complicated and various than have been encapsulated by the dominant concepts of, for example, the Frontier, conflict, and resistance, which still act as broad guiding principles in many narratives of the history of the British colonisation of Australia (yes, even academic histories). In short, wrote historian Bain Attwood, ‘there were a range of ways in which the colonised and coloniser related to one another’. Indigenous Australians were not simply passive victims, but sought variously to adapt, accept, resist, or take refuge.

I highlight this kind of history-making not only to emphasise the work of academic historians, but because it is central to understanding what is actually meant by ‘truth-telling’ in 2019.

An example of this kind of history can be found in Attwood’s recent The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers, and the Protectors. Although The Good Country is, ostensibly, a local history, concerned with a relatively small set of individuals and acting within clearly defined spatial and temporal limits, Attwood is well-attuned to the contemporary political implications of his work. In 2013, the Victorian government and the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation reached an agreement that formally recognised the Djadja Wurrung as the traditional owners of their land in central Victoria. The agreement granted freehold title to two properties of particular cultural and historical significance and transferred two national parks, one regional park, two state parks and one reserve to Aboriginal title. The agreement also provided significant funding for the advancement of Djadja Wurrung cultural and economic goals.

Such settlements between Australian governments and Aboriginal claimants to native title, Attwood reminds us, are an outcome of the gradual rise of the Aboriginal rights movement in the post-war era — rights for Aboriginal people, as both the descendants of the original peoples of the country and as peoples who had suffered enormously because of British colonisation. These were essentially historical claims, provoking an Aboriginal history movement that emerged to meet the needs of Aboriginal people: family histories and genealogies; ethnographic accounts of traditional culture; histories of resistance and histories of dispossession. Attwood writes that ‘Aboriginal people’s demands for Aboriginal rights and the manner in which the Australian state responded to these have led to a certain kind of history being produced so that both parties are able to realise their various economic, cultural and political goals’.

This form of history-making, argues Attwood, has stressed cultural difference and tradition and has emphasised, in response to native title legislation, continuous links with traditional culture. Furthermore, ‘claimants produce histories that stress on the one hand the overwhelming power of the settler state and settler peoples, and their dispossession, destruction and displacement of Aboriginal people and culture, and hence their responsibility for what has happened and their obligation to provide redress’, but also Aboriginal people’s resistance, ‘including, most importantly, their maintenance of tradition’.

Drawing on the example of claims made at the announcement of the recognition and settlement agreement between the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Coporation and the Victorian government, and the adjacent case of the repatriation of Djadja Wurrung artefacts from British museums, Attwood points to conflicts between history of the kind that supports assertions made by the Aboriginal rights movement and meets demands laid out by the Australian state, and, on the other hand, history of the sort produced in universities and museums.

Often the two kinds of history-making overlap, but where there is a conflict it has been helpfully theorised by Dipesh Chakrabarty in terms of subaltern pasts and minority histories, which do not necessarily ‘conform to the protocols demanded by the discipline of history or meet the conditions for rationality that are demanded by it and the democratic nation state it serves’. Such subaltern voices have, consequently, often been assigned an inferior position in historical discourse. Furthermore, critics have tended to exaggerate the extent to which paying heed to these narratives would ‘lead to an outbreak of what they regard as hapless relativism or postmodern irrationalism’.

Historians working on the history of frontier massacres are careful to take these issues seriously, knowing that their work can have political and legal ramifications for Indigenous people and communities. ‘Truth-telling’ in this context is about much more than offering well-evidenced platitudes.

History and Truth-Telling

This brings me to a third and final point, which is that how this history is written and presented matters for the progress of Indigenous rights.

Prof. Ryan’s massacre map is an essentially empirical exercise, but an important one. It aims to: ‘Identify the site of every known frontier massacre in Australia that can be verified with corroborating evidence; Devise a coherent methodology to interrogate the evidence of massacre; Identify the regions where frontier massacres were prevalent; Estimate the number of frontier massacres and the number of casualties.’ There are issues around local Indigenous communities not wishing to have their massacres mapped (‘Come and talk to us if you want to know’, one Gunditjmara elder has told me), and whether memorialisation as we understand is itself a colonial imposition. But on the whole, simply assembling this body of evidence — with rigour, and good evidence — is an integral task in a society that still downplays the subaltern voice, and the histories and truths Indigenous people have tried to tell for generations.

As mentioned above, on the other hand, The Guardian is seeking to ‘to assemble information necessary to begin truth telling — not just the grim tally of more than a century of frontier bloodshed, but its human cost — as told by descendants on all sides. This is the history we have all inherited.’ To their credit, The Guardian has incorporated a range of Indigenous voices (‘subaltern pasts and minority histories’) in their coverage. It is a different project to Prof. Ryan’s, despite using the same source material for its central piece of reportage.

There is an opportunity to explore the possibilities raised by Attwood’s calls for complex, local histories, but what is more common to see are echoes of movements from the early 1990s, when the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation sought to bring together traditional views of Australian history with newer Indigenous histories. This was a project Attwood refers to as ‘shared history’, which, he writes, ‘largely conceives of history as a body of historical facts presented as a singular story compiled by an anonymous narrator’. Attwood puts forward a compelling argument for ‘sharing histories’ instead:

[S]haring history tends to regard history as a collection of narratives told by differently situated or positioned peoples and hence contingent on who the teller is, what their purpose is, the context in which they tell their story, and who their audience is. In conceiving of history in this way, sharing histories highlights the conjunction between past and present as the ground upon which all history-making occurs.

Attwood argues that recognising that historical knowledge is a matter of perspective is not a relativist position, but simply the acknowledgement that ‘the most significant parts of historical narratives are always contingent, limited and partial’. This approach to reconciling the history-making of colonised and coloniser, he suggests,

assumes that democracies such as Australia will continue to be peopled by groups with diverse histories and identities, presumes that there will continue to be contestation and conflict … Most importantly [sharing histories] would allow for different forms of historical knowledge, thereby providing for a measure of equality between academic history and Aboriginal ways of relating to the past.

What Attwood argues, therefore, is that we move away from attempts to build a monolithic national narrative that all of us can agree upon, for these attempts have been shown to be futile in all of their guises. Many people direct this criticism at the original Reconciliation process.

Instead, history-making itself should be seen as an act of cross-cultural communication — this is a form that emerges from the Uluru Statement, as I discuss below. Such a project might be more successful with a renewed focus on spatial and temporal specificity and contingency, and an openness to complexity and ‘messiness’ grounded in local archival research as opposed to the tendency toward the highly conceptual and programmatic historical reflections on ‘the Australian experience’.

There are calls in The Guardian ‘for a national truth-telling process’, and The Killing Times is intended to support this goal. ‘Learning about this history will come as a shock to some. But Australians trying to move past blame or guilt are coming forward now in greater numbers, and their voices are only growing louder,’ they write.

It is important to focus on truth-telling. According to the latest Australian Reconciliation Barometer, 80 per cent of Australians believe it is important to “undertake formal truth telling processes”. Eighty-six per cent believe it is important to learn about past issues. But what is meant, exactly, by ‘truth-telling’ is important too.

As Karen Mundine and Richard Weston write in their contribution to the series:

Historical injustice is still a source of intergenerational trauma for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and we see it playing out in families and communities across the country. Our nation’s past is reflected in the present and, unless we can heal historical wounds, they will continue to play out in our country’s future.

Truth telling has an impact on every aspect of the lives of our stolen generations, including their ability to access services and support systems. It has the capacity to build social capital, goodwill and unity through processes of creating shared understanding of our history and building knowledge so that we can avoid repeating mistakes of the past. It also helps inform better policy that reduces the impacts on our people’s health and welfare.

In some columns and reportage there are direct lines drawn between truth-telling and more-than-symbolic action. The Uluru Statement from the Heart has predominantly called for real structural reform [emphasis my own]:

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country. We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution. Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history

And, as The Guardian reports Wiradjuri-Wailwan lawyer and human rights advocate, Teela Reid, explains:

The invitation as expressed in the Uluru statement was for the entire nation to embark on a journey of truth telling through structural law reform as told from the local level … The Uluru statement makes clear to every Australian that First Nations sovereignty never was, never will be ceded and it is time to build a country based on truth and justice through substantive and sequenced reform: voice, treaty and truth … The Uluru statement called for sophisticated and serious law reform: first by enshrining a voice in the constitution and second, by establishing a Makarrata commission to engage in a formal treaty and truth-telling process … Truth telling is the third component in the sequence of reforms.

The concept of ‘truth telling through structural law reform as told from the local level’ is significant here because it emphasises the contingent, complex, local nature of the history-making that is demanded from the Uluru Statement, and connects this to actual legal reform. Not apologies in parliament, or memorials, or educational programmes: actual legal reform.

As Professor Megan Davis has outlined, dialogues leading to the Uluru Statement did not express interest in national truth and reconciliation, but rather a ‘local, relational’ process that may not necessarily be public; Indigenous people and communities weren’t interested in ‘big, showy public displays of “truth”’. This is why localised history-making of the kind advocated in Aboriginal History, and demonstrated in Attwood’s work among others, is important.

And, as Prof. Davis explains, ‘One of the barriers to substantive rights for mob has always been misplaced empathy. We don’t need platitudes about truth telling. We need our allies to support hard headed structural reform so that the state is compelled to listen to the First Nations.’

What we have with The Guardian’s recent work are glimpses and possibilities of the history-making that can support reform. Maps provide local context and information, but here they are presented in a monolithic national narrative, animated by false representations of the historical literature that underlies the data points. The Killing Times offers difficult, brutal stories of colonisation that are familiar to historians and Indigenous people and communities, but perhaps unfamiliar to many others. Readers are encouraged to learn about what happened, where, and to become empathetic. But this isn’t ‘truth-telling’ as envisaged in the Uluru Statement: truth-telling that is local, complex, relational, contingent, and — most importantly — expressed through substantive constitutional change and structural reform. Storytelling will continue, but if we want it to lead to anything we have to get it right.

Sections of this blog have been excerpted from my essay, ‘Landscapes of the Dead: History and memory in a distant field of murder’, Meanjin, Summer 2016 as well as from my review of Attwood’s book. I welcome comments and feedback and will revise as necessary.