Myth and reality in Australian colonial history and beyond

1

Myth and Reality in Australian Colonial History and Beyond

Ray Gibbons (2015)

Abstract: Much of Australian history is in the form of ‘myth’. The absence of case law

makes the investigation of massacres more difficult. Many university history

faculties discourage such conflict studies as unnecessarily negative, preferring to

focus on ‘race relations’. The debate gave rise to the ‘history wars’ and a

repudiation of the ‘black armband view’ of history. This paper contends that a

culture of denialism has perpetuated some of the dysfunctional behaviours that

drove violent Aboriginal depopulation.There is evidence that Australia is in a late

stage Lemkinian genocidal process.

For many years, I only slowly realized the horrific extent of Aboriginal depopulation after the

British invasive occupation. I was culturally and historically blind, carried along by popular

mythology, by the dominant teaching paradigm, by the compelling narrative of heroic settler

sovereignty and benign pastoralism in ‘taming the land’. Some political parties and

prestigious universities still discourage overly critical examination of our past, believing that

it may perpertuate an overtly negative view of Australia’s history. Instead, Governments may

ask their constituents to dismiss historical acts of violent racism and some university history

faculties ask their students to focus on bland, dispassionate studies such as ‘race relations’ or

‘Aboriginal European’ relations, rather than massacres and the egregious role of Imperial

Britain.1 The absurdist proposition is like a law court admonishing the counsel for an alleged

offender: ‘Please do not mention the crimes of the accused. It is too negative. Please

concentrate on the contributions of the accused to the betterment of society’. It is Dadaesqe in

its implications. What we are being asked to do is ignore the bloody events of our past,

because it is unhelpful to our multicultural future and our national self-image. But if our past

is not acknowleded, how can our future values be qualitatively any better or more

considered? Already Australia has the reputation for the greatest number of mammalian

extinctions in the world, caused by excessive land clearing, the introduction of feral animals

1 The tendency of certain defined groups to adhere to dominant paradigms was first noted by Thomas Kuhn in the Sructure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Normative values and modes of thought are an artefact of probability density functions, where the behavioural distribution pattern can be further shaped by directed processes.

2

and over-grazing. Already, we are recognised for an Aboriginal depopulation figure of well

over 90% since colonisation until the time of Federation. But we are asked to ignore our

scotoma, our disability, our dysfunction, assuming that we even recognise the existence of the

pathology. We are asked to ignore any unblinkered ways of seeing reality. Until we

recognise our past and demand accountability, we must continue with denialism, with

perpetuating the ‘standards of the time’ argument, with acceding to the egregious

Windschuttle argument that the absence of case law means that genocidal violence did not

happen in the longest war in our history. We are asked, as part of the ‘history wars’ and the

associated ‘black armband view of history’ derogated by some historians, to ignore those

negative aspects of our genocidal past and focus on the heroic endeavours of nation building

and the betterment of race relations. We must resist; and we must continue to question.

This document examines the circumstances of the anecdotal Murdering Creek event, in itself

a quite ordinary tale for the times, but within an extraordinarily violent and racist period,

when we consider it objectively. Within one hundred and twenty years, as a result of the

British invasion and occupation, Aboriginal society suffered a cataclysmic drop in their

population of over 90%, from a precontact figure between 750,000 and 1.2 million. For this

reason, we are more interested in exploring if we can use the myth of Murdering Creek as a

case instance of the British occupation process, a multi-phase invasion that began with

beachhead settlements, continued through extirpation and introduced disease, and ended with

subjugation, a process that continues today.

The British policy gave no recognition to Aboriginal land ownership. Britain deemed

that the continent was ‘free’, owned by the ‘Crown’, leaving Aboriginal society homeless,

refugees in their own land, trespassers in their own country. The invasive process frequently

crossed over to deliberate Lemkinian genocide, with extermination accompanied by cultural

and mental destruction, sexual predation, eugenics, and the theft of children. Britain (until

1838) and later colonial Governments quite intentionally removed Aboriginals from their

homelands by various means including legislation and armed force. As the final phase of the

subjugation process, the original owners were made subject to increasingly oppressive

Government policies, which had the inevitable result in further reducing Aboriginal

3

population numbers and behaviours to something more manageable, carried out by an

acquisitive society that was determined to claim the land as property.2

The deconstruction of event-based myths

Myths are a constructed reality, a large part of how we perceive our history and ourselves. So

is much in life. We invent ourselves day by day. Where myths differ from common

experience is that they are less rooted in the events of everyday existence. Accordingly, we

assess them through a process of verification, using any factual evidence that may be

available. The less easily we can verify them, the more tenuous they become. Nevertheless,

many of our more enduring myths derive from an actual event, which now carries a layered

overburden of accretions built up from what we may choose to believe or prefer to remember,

like an old family story told too many times across the generations, the authenticity no longer

reliable.

Deconstruction gives us the time and ability to think, to question, rather than the

tentative duty to believe. Can event-based myths, when deconstructed, help us know

ourselves afresh? If we forensically explore beyond the surface of historicity to the sleeping

depths of mythical narrative and oral history, if we prise out the verifiable evidence from

accumulated detritus, can it help us to better self-understanding? After all, myths pervade our

lives.

All around us are the stories: of massacres and dark doings; of heroism in the face of

adversity; of pioneer resolve against the odds; of rising settler sovereignty through enduring

hard work; and of benign land occupation, where Aboriginals inexplicably disappeared

through some dimly understood law of nature. What do we believe? Should we consider our

historical myths as a richly connected soil for patient investigation, to uncover the kernels of

truth? Or is faulty memory to be our future, based on a frequently confected and imagined

past?

The assuagement of post contact history

Australian post-contact history is to a measurable extent founded on heroic mythology. There

is, of course, the myth of the ANZACs at Gallipoli, in reality a bloody defeat caused by the

ineptitude of the British military command. But the biggest myth of all is probably that of 2 See the Appendix in this document for a summary of the way in which the processes of invasive occupation and Lemkinian genocide overlap. For a more detailed analysis, see FWAYAF Political Uses of Australian Genocide.

4

benign pastoral triumphalism where Aboriginals mysteriously melted away as Britain

progressively usurped the land. Not true of course. There was no mysterious melting, no

withering away through some mystical Darwinian process. The pastoral frontier swept

Aboriginals aside in a process that involved introduced disease, sexual predation, and

extermination, a firestorm of individual massacres, almost none ever properly acknowledged

because of the unwillingness to prosecute those responsible. And how could there be

prosecutions when the Government3 was all too often directly involved through the armed

instruments of power, while they aggressively pursued a legislated policy of dispossession,

what we now call ethnic cleansing and more, where a line was often crossed into genocide.

It was the longest war in our history, a war for land. Wars have victors not

perpetrators. In some sense, the war continues today, a war of social inequality where many

Aboriginals remain excessively disadvantaged.4 Victors tend to write history as they see it. In

consequence, the past is open to distortion and reflexivity, the future too easily biased on a

contrived divide of conquerors and conquered, winners and losers. Victors are rewarded, not

punished; those responsible for crimes are left unaccountable, the ugly truths left unsaid. The

spread of the pastoral frontier was ‘good’; Aboriginal resistance was ‘bad’. We still see the

historical evidence, a lingering echo of violent subjugation, but it is becoming dimmer as

Australia marches into pluralism.

3 The term Government will be used in a collective sense, meaning any Government – either British or Colonial – over the period of interest. 4 See for example FWAYAF Beyond 1928, and Bringing Them Home, Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, 1997. This was a ground breaking report, commissioned by the Attorney-General at the time (Michael Lavarch) into the ‘stolen generation’, which chronicled continuing Aboriginal disadvantage and mistreatment. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-stolen-children-report-1997 Indeed, the Productivity Commission’s November 2014 report ‘Closing the Gap’, shows the problems are getting much worse. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/ctg-progress-and-priorities-report.pdf

Yet little is done. Commonwealth Government funding to ‘close the gap’ on Aboriginal disadvantage is being scaled back. The Commonwealth says it is a State problem, to deflect accountability, and the States return fire. Seventeen years after the Lavarch report was issued, there is still little progress in addressing the problems. The despair, poverty and alienation, which the detailed reports identify, has morphed into high levels of suicide, disproportionately excessive incarceration, and wide spread drug abuse, particularly for regional and rural areas. Aboriginal communities are consistent on what they want: Constitutional recognition; economic self-determination; adequate infrastructure and services; mining rights; and the protection of land, language and culture. [Joe Morrison, CEO, Northern Land Council, Press Club Address, February 2015]. Yet Government continues to erode remote Aboriginal basic rights with excessive regulation, work for the dole schemes, sequestered pensions, and the push for 99 year leases over Aboriginal land. It is yet another wave of imposed Government subjugation, for which it is unsurprising that Aboriginals remain among the most disadvantaged ethnic groups on Earth.

5

Is it possible to develop forensic tools to investigate any massacre myth? If so, it may

make our actual history more accessible. Perhaps we can begin with one myth and use it as a

case study to explore any or all myths, a rich vein of history for too long buried.

The provenance of the Murdering Creek myth

This, therefore, is the story of Murdering Creek in South East Queensland, just south of

iconic Noosa. As a place name location, it is now a peaceful creek running north into Lake

Weyba, and is still recognized on council maps. Today, upmarket houses claim the southern

shores of the lake. The residents would prefer to change the name of the creek, because they

believe it detracts from property values, yet the appellation stubbornly hangs on.

Where did the name Murdering Creek come from? We know it carries down from the

19th century, part of folklore. But how did it earn such a violent name? What is its

provenance? Like much of our history, myth shrouds the toponymy, hinting of a dark past. In

1950, a Tewantin resident called David Bull5 published a collection of anecdotes, where he

sets out his recollection of the local history. He writes ‘Apparently the blacks were not being

shot quickly enough, so a party of eight men was organised by a policeman and the manager

of the station to shoot them quicker. Murdering Creek was the chosen place’.6 Bull does not

reveal his sources, an all too common practice at the time to protect those involved, many of

whom became respected members of colonial society. To traduce their reputation would have

(and often did) invite public disapprobation. Even then, the past was something to forget or

ignore, or if not ignore, then defiantly justify as the extermination of vermin.

For more than a century the circumstances of Murdering Creek have become myth,

arguably a conflated yarn, something too easily too easily accepted (or just as uncritically

dismissed) among the myriad of such anecdotes, all of which whisper from the ‘great

Australian silence’. Was there a massacre at Murdering Creek? If so, when? Who was

involved? And why? Until now, after more than a century, these questions were simply too

difficult to pursue. The myth of Murdering Creek remained open to conjecture, until recently

a persistent mystery. We will show that Murdering Creek is more than myth. It is a layered

55 Bull, David William. Born 8th February 1872 in Monkland Gympie. Died 20th February 1960 and buried in Mt. Thompson Cemetery 6 David Bull, Short Cut to Gympie Gold, p. 33.

6

contextual referent,7 a patterned instance of murderous behaviour that was expressed over a

considerable period of more than a century, a violent and racist period that we now prefer to

gloss over with a conjured history of heroic settler sovereignty, a more convenient and

palatable narrative to engage and sustain an emerging multi-cultural society.

Investigative approach

How are we to conduct our investigation then? The easiest way might be the traditional: to

review the available sources; to examine the contextual history; to assess the available facts;

and finally to arrive at some conclusion. But history is a multi-dimensional problem. All too

often, it is subject to reflexivity or observer bias. It involves actors, motivations, political and

economic drivers, legislation, events, timelines, places and opportunities. The traditional

approach will quickly mire us in complexity, where it becomes difficult to see relationships

and causal vectors. Is it possible to model the referents at different levels of abstraction?

Some may argue that, beyond what happens over a discrete period, we cannot model

human behaviour; but is this correct? Much as we like to think otherwise, humans are

generally predictable, responding to risk/ reward gradients. We tend to act upon our

environment through a set of planned and intended behaviours, which we hope might give us

some beneficial return. If our behaviours, including motivations, conform to any collective

pattern, then the pattern can be modelled. For colonial Australia, collective behaviour was

shaped by discrete and legislated Government policies, in thrall to British imperial objectives.

British colonial policies and their antipodean consequences

Self-enrichment remains a powerful motivator, and it is on proud display in any freewheeling

economy, whether democratic or communist. This was no less so in frontier Australia, where

the opportunities for exploitation and fortune seeking were immense, much greater than in the

British homeland. Government land policies started a land rush, particularly the UK Waste

Land Act of 1842, which triggered violent occupation across a rapidly expanding frontier.

7 In system modelling theory, the usual reductive analytical approach is to examine the interaction between subject and object at different levels of detail, which requires us to make an epistemic distinction between the two when the associated narrative of the system dynamic irreducibly depends on context. Although we will represent processes as a nested hierarchy, essentially scalar in their decompositional mapping, we will preserve the context of any event or set of events or sub-process as a case instance typology. That is, the case instance becomes a contextual referent at some specified level of process mapping, where each level shows a certain contextually dependent emergent behaviour. The corollary is that there also exists a contextual hierarchy for a given process decomposition and we will adumbrate this hierarchy in our examples.

7

As Britain progressively granted self-government to different parts of the country,

self-sufficiency became a priority, revenue and self-enrichment the mantra. Aboriginals could

simply be pushed aside for the ‘greater good’. So they were. They became people without

rights. Aboriginals became expendable fodder before the compelling altar of pecuniary gain.

There were serious public arguments that no crime of dispossession or extermination had

been committed against Aboriginals because they were sub-human, who had to give way to a

‘more fit’ society, a superior race. Squatter supremacism ignored the bloody human cost,

whereas social progress demanded it. Society fell into determined racism, with apartheid and

a White Australia the solution. Hagiography replaced historical fact.

Little has changed today. For their part, Aboriginals as a group continue to remain

disadvantaged. A pluralistic society pushes them to the shadows, where many remain

marginalised and forgotten, living in abject conditions, dying before their time, the heavy

target of police, with incarceration more than six times likely as the general population. It is

appalling that it happens. But it is more appalling that we allow it to happen. It is a systemic

problem now. It was a systemic problem then. And systems, by their nature, are procedural.

They comprise a series of actions bound by cause and effect or, if you prefer, triggers and

outcomes that work together in a prescribed network of actionable components. Systems have

purpose. They can operate at different levels of abstraction. So should our models. We should

start our investigation using our proposed model for the occupation process,8 as it is

particularly relevant to the period under study, which gave us the Murdering Creek event.

When we overlay the Government policies in place at this time, the event becomes on

balance the expected outcome of Government intent. It means the line has been crossed into

Lemkinian genocide as we know it now, but at the time was simply a policy of extermination,

where pastoralists were their own judge and jury, with little fear of prosecution, and

Governments used mounted police as roving death squads.

Murdering Creek as a contextual referent (or case instance)

The occupation process and the resulting rise of settler sovereignty in Australia was not a one

off. It happens often enough to have a pattern. Australia was not the first to invent the

policies of subjugation, as part of a national strategy involving violent territorial occupation.

Others preceded, and many were to follow, among them: China’s ruthless 1950 occupation of 8 The detailed model for the occupation process, an encapsulated set of actionable components with specific triggering conditions and outcomes, is set out in the Appendix.

8

Tibet (extending territorial reach),9 ISIL’s 2014 ambitions for a Middle East caliphate (brutal

religious zealotry), Indonesia’s 1975 invasive occupation of East Timor (attempting to obtain

land by force and extra-judicial mass killings), and South Africa with its post WWII

massacres, apartheid and violent repression (politically driven racism).

There is troubling but unconfirmed evidence that some of the South African practices

were carefully adopted from Queensland10 because they were so effective.11 How can we

understand the forces that drove an event like the putative Murdering Creek mass killing?

The type process for invasive occupation

Is it possible to build a type process for which Murdering Creek is an instance? Is it possible

to use modern techniques such as systems theory to help us investigate any massacre ‘myth’

– a widely held belief or record of an event that is (nevertheless) inherently presumed to be

false or at least difficult to penetrate, difficult to verify, what we might call an interesting but

potentially tall tale - at the Australian frontier?

Perhaps there is more to frontier massacre myths than we have acknowledged.

Perhaps they tell us a story that we should listen to, if we are not to repeat similar mistakes 9 There are an uncomfortable number of other contemporary examples involving Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Croatia, Serbia, Russia, Iraq, Rwanda, Burma, Turkey, Romania, Libya, Syriaand others that involve repression and large scale homicides that may (or may not) include an occupation process. Conversely, some occupation processes are driven by a desire for strategic self-defense, including Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, but this appears to be motivated primarily by a need for self-protection, because the Palestian authority still denies Israel’s right to exist. Nevertheless, settlers continue to build illegal settlements on what the Security Council prefers to call ‘contested territory’or what some Jewish people call ‘the land promised to them by God’, leaving displaced Palestinians without a home and without legal redress. It is ironic that Israel, having suffered fearful depredations in the past, should not feel ambivalent about their situation today. Indeed, some Israelis do. We are mainly interested in occupation processes – past and present - that extend into massacres and possible genocide. They are mostly nation-states, either emerging or actual, places such as colonial Australia. Israel is clearly not a member of this group. 10 The Queensland 1897 Act and its amendments until the 1970s, what Aboriginals still fearfully recall as ‘living under the Act’, was in its intention and effect an apartheid policy. See FWAYAF Documents That Shaped Our Nation, for a transcript. 11 In August 2014, I attended a conference at UTS called From Gallipoli to Coniston, expertly moderated by Heather Goodall. The conference invited discussion on the different ways in which we treat myths, from the heroic to the embarrassed. I was moved by the sad anger of some of the Aboriginal attendees. There was an animated exchange on apartheid: how the Queensland administration had been contacted by that in South Africa to help them implement a similar apartheid system to Australia’s. Reynolds and Lake also more generally exposed this appalling racist chapter in Australia’s history, something few of us now remember. [Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 2008 ] What was sadder: many of the Aboriginal spokespeople were recounting the indigenous experiences of dispossession from the writings of white historians. It reminded me of John Steele’s comment, mentioned earlier.

9

that can arise in response to any number of potential societal stressors, which may include our

management of refugees, or disease pandemics, or rising economic and religious militancy,

or species loss or climate threats. Perhaps the ‘greater good’, however narrowly or broadly it

may be defined, is not the best guide to purposeful action, either individual or collective.

Perhaps the utilitarian policy is what remains, when we fail to respond early enough to root

causes, when we fail to recognise triggering conditions or the processes that shape them. Or

perhaps, in Britain’s case, the utilitarian policy was coldly intentional, driven by the greater

good of the British Empire and the relatively small number of people who benefited, a

carefully planned and administered colonial policy that sought land, wealth and power for a

privileged few.

History as a behavioural landscape

Human history is not a sequence of random events. It is an unfolding of behaviour, revealed

through defining moments, which can affect the momentum of a social group through time.

Systems theory12 is relevant in understanding and recognising any pattern of social

behaviour, including myths if they arise from factual circumstance. The past is not an

aberration. It repeats too frequently, and when it repeats, it is through patterned purpose. For

civil society, social behaviour is usually intentional and predictable, generally determined by

policy and legislation. Intent is planned action, often procedural in its nature. Intent usually

follows from beliefs or desires (ideological values) and leads to purposeful activity (shaped

by legislation).

How can we show the complex, multi-dimensional link between historical events and

patterned process? How can we verify that a ‘myth’, if it occurred, was not necessarily an

isolated event, but part of a planned set of activities, that is, part of an intentional process?

First, we must define the behavioural process pattern (or type, or dependent variable).

Then we must determine if the type instances (or independent variables or specific events)

will confirm the pattern. Conversely, if we can identify instances that do not conform to the

process pattern, then we can amend or refute our theoretical process model. In particular, we

12 Systems theory: the configuration of parts joined together by a web of relationships. A system can be thought of (and modelled) as a nested hierarchy, where wholes – or complex systems - consist of parts, each of which comprise more wholes. Also see, for example, Banathy (1997), http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/assem04bb.html Systems as a whole can also be mapped at increasing levels of detail. We will use this modelling approach here. The term theory is used in the scientific meaning: a reasoned set of ideas intended to explain something, such as Gravitation or Boolean logic. A process such as Lemkinian Genocide is an example of a system. Therefore, systems theory can be used to explain genocide.

10

want to identify if the theoretical process pattern for the occupation process is a consistent

mapping of any particular colonial event instance, including putative massacres.

Our models must (and will) go beyond what happened in Australia (and Murdering

Creek in particular) to providing some insight into why: the intentionality that drove the

occupation process and the ethnic cleansing that followed as deliberate Government policy,

with massacres the all too frequent enabler of occupation policy, being the most cost effective

and timely method for removing or quickly subjugating the indigenous population in any area

claimed by pastoralists.

Modelling the emergent patterns of complex systems

There are various identifiable processes13 that embed the policies of subjugation and

repression (or forcible control) as a functional component of the ‘process’ to varying degrees,

among them: occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass killing, massacre, and settler

sovereignty. These processes can form the basis for a semantic typology, using the ordered

relationships between the ‘actionable components’.14 This is not to say that, as an example,

the occupation process is synonymous with genocide or its variants. It is not. But the

common behavioural determinants across the processes are consistent with oppression (the

effect of asymmetric power) and a propensity towards exploitation (an artefact of the power

advantage). Intent shapes process and has different levels of abstraction, which can be

modelled.

Strictly speaking, an ‘actionable component’ within a process is not a ‘functional

component’ but a sub-process, activity string or activity. They are usually described by a

verb/object construction (say ‘control wiper’) and can assume various ‘states’ (such as

‘wiper’ ‘on’) as a result of some action or stimulus. A function, sub-function or ‘functional

component’ is usually described by a noun (‘wiper control’). Both functions and processes

can be analysed as a nested decomposition; the difference is that a process exhibits dynamical

behaviour, whereas a function has only static behaviour, often specified through a

hierarchical (or sometimes exploded) function model, showing the functional relationship

between the parts, but not the triggering framework.

This brief discussion is akin to the 20 year debate among holocaust historians who

distinguish ‘intentionalism’ from ‘functionalism’. One side argues there was a Nazi master 13 These processes are analysed in FWAYAF The Political Uses of Australian Genocide. 14 See FWAYAF The Political Uses of Australian Genocide.

11

plan for death camps that arose with Hitler (intentionalism), the other that there was not, but

rather a bureaucratic understanding for extermination that organically grew as a self-

organising model to embrace the Nazi objectives (functionalism).

Intentionalism and functionalism

Intentionalism is the carrying out of a planned and deliberate act or process, usually by

Government, and usually ‘top-down’. Functionalism, within the genocide debate, is the

origination of collective behaviour from the will and motivation of a crowd, generally seen as

a ‘bottom up’ process. The argument is that each type of behaviour is mutually exclusive of

the other, and specifically that the Nazi genocidal excesses either derived from Hitler or from

the Nazi bureaucracy, with the debate favouring the Nazi bueaucracy. By implication, the

argument proffers that Australian genocide was not intended by the Government, but was an

unplanned functional consequence of other behaviours that involved land policy and the

security of settlers.

The distinction between intentionalism and functionalism was first suggested by

Timothy Mason in a 1981 essay: Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about

the Interpretation of National Socialism in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, edited

by Jane Caplan.15 The distinction is an artefact of reframing or misdirection, where the

parameters of the argument are shifted to a space that is seen as more winnable.

The distinction between intentionality and functionalism dissolves when we consider,

with process models, that ‘intentionality’ is embedded as a triggering condition, which causes

certain sub-processes or ‘functionality’ to be activated, causing a statistically predictable

dynamic behaviour in the system as a whole, in order to achieve some expected outcome. In

this system, processes (‘intentionality’) and events (actionable components or ‘functions’)

are co-determinate and may be iterative within an intentionality envelope defined by

triggering conditions (or event causes). Such triggering conditions (or ‘causes’) can be nested

or procedural, related by the purpose (or intent) of the process, one condition flowing from

another depending on the determinable ‘state’ for any sub-process after it has been actioned

(forming a ‘causal chain’ or process flow, where an ‘event flow’ connects the specific

instantiations of the process). 16

15 For an overview of the debate, see Mimi-Cecilia Pascoe, Intentionalism and Functionalism: Explaining the Holocaust http://eview.anu.edu.au/burgmann/issue2/pdf/ch06.pdf 16 See the Appendix for a graphical description.

12

The misuse of reframing in analytical history

‘Reframing’ is an effective method to alter the parameters of an argument, based on false

logic. If I say to you ‘It’s not about x, it’s about y’, which we hear often from our politicians,

this is reframing. It is a common political debating trick, to influence public discussion. It

often results in ‘dog whistling’, where public disapprobation is marshalled against some

identified public concern. Having reframed a discussion, it is frequently followed up with a

‘straw man’, which is then easily demolished by its proponent.

In the past, it was common to assert ‘Aboriginals are no better than animals; they are

a lower form of humanity’, following the logic of misplaced Darwinian supremacist thinking.

It was then a small extra step to conclude, ’if Aboriginals are no more than animals, it is okay

to exterminate them as feral pests’. And so, it was done.

Murdering Creek is an instance, one of a multiplicity, in what became ethnic

cleansing, using the sharp edge of genocide. Today, reframing remains pervasive. For

example, we are encouraged by our Government to think of boat people as ‘queue jumpers’,

or ‘security threats’, and by demonising them (through reframing), it is then easier for our

society to treat them very harshly.

There is some evidence that Aboriginals living in squalid conditions in remote

communities are similarly tar-brushed with political and public disapproval, the argument

being that they are undeserving of ‘handouts’ for as long as some white people are also

disadvantaged. Our society is then eager to agree, being led by the argument ‘what about me’,

and perniciously motivated by a form of downward envy.

The consequence is that Aboriginal disadvantage becomes endemic for as long as they

depend on public goodwill and financial support. Of course, the more appropriate response is

to recognise the discriminatory social problem that Aboriginals face, and provide adequate

housing, sanitation, education and healthcare, with less targeted policing. As Noel Pearson

correctly points out, ‘What is needed is a hand up, not a handout’. But it also needs legal

recognition of genocide, a change to the Constitution, a Bill of Rights, better political

representation, and proper reparation. The problems highlighted by events such as Murdering

Creek have still to be addressed in our society.

A variation on reframing is the false choice (or false dichotomy), where we are asked

to consider two options that we are told are mutually exclusive, something that is rarely the

case. For example, we might be told that we must give up individual freedoms for greater

national security. In fact, we can have both individual freedoms and national security, with

13

appropriate policy settings. Quite often, the false choice arises because existing regulations

and laws are not properly enforced, which can cause an extreme overreaction in an

emergency. Emergencies are often the result of unstable systems, where the dynamical

behaviour is pushed into non-linearity by processes whose effects are amplified by poorly

controlled positive feedback, as we see with the behavioural dysfunction in colonial

Australia.

System behavioural dynamics

The behavioural dynamics of a process can become deterministic within an intentionality

envelope with certain causal vectors, for example: when oppression arises from defence (to

protect one’s culture and territorial boundaries from threat); or from aggression (with one

sided laws and the use of police and military to enforce those laws); or from territorial

imperatives (the desire to expand an area of influence, using the means at hand); or from

other basic drivers such as a desire for self-enrichment or political reach.

Policies and conditional triggers are co-determinate, forming hierarchical

‘intentionality’ along an abstraction gradient, with corresponding levels of process

enablement, from an agreed Government course of action and legislative framework, right

down to the coordinated operational activities across different organisational ‘functions’, a

process in which civil society participates as one of the important ‘actors’.

The cascading behavioural relationships within a process are equivalent to a Markov

probability chain as a predictable stochastic process, where the resultant states (or outcomes)

of some defined process (or sub-process) are discrete and determinable, depending on the

triggering conditions. Identifying these collective behavioural constraints (or determinants) is

not the same as implied cultural criticism; rather it is simply detached observation. The

observation is independent of functionalism or behaviourism, which we briefly examine later.

Sometimes, acute societal sensitivity to behavioural criticism can be intrinsically

manipulative. Consider settler society’s defiant reaction to any criticism of Aboriginal

oppression, or any public suggestion or disapprobation of sexual predation or slavery where

the accuser was usually vilified and ostracised.17 In these cases, normative behaviour was

dysfunctional, corresponding to a collective societal disorder, and societal responses are

17 See L.E. Threlkeld, J.B. Gribble and others; FWAYAF Recollections From a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier 1788 – 1928

14

therefore an inadequate indication of ethical propriety or rectitude, where dysfunction formed

the general moral compass, generally based on the acquisition of wealth.

Colonial societies could be judged,18 but they were rarely found accountable. Victors

and those in power tend to make the rules, and these rules extend to policies, legislation, and

their enforcement. The persistent effects of the Australian occupation process and its

genocidal overtones, where the two processes intersect, are still evident in chronic Aboriginal

disadvantage today. It means we must move humanitarian concerns away from a narrow

socio-political perspective to something more sustainable and equitable, perhaps a Bill of

Rights, which may give a juridical framework to what is ‘right’. We may not succeed. Not

unless we confront the past.

Proposed analytical methodology - in summary

What we call ‘real’ is contingent upon the reach of our tools, the difference between using

our naked eye or a microscope. Tools extend the boundary of the known into the unknown.

This document presents, perhaps for the first time, an analytical methodology that will allow

us to investigate any massacre myth, beginning with Murdering Creek. Beyond the traditional

approach, we will use systems theory to examine the story behind Murdering Creek, which

becomes an example – or case instance – of the methodology. We will develop forensic tools

that can help prise open any other ‘myth’, potentially allowing us to rediscover the facts of

our sprawling anecdotal past, a past that we can otherwise dismissively brush aside as mere

oral or narrative history. The methodological tools include process, event and case models,

where the power of feedback19 helps define the outcome.

18 Consider the 1837 Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, (British Settlements) which noted ‘On the value of the accompanying Report there can hardly be two opinions. The appalling facts which it discloses, and the judicious suggestions it contains, combine to render it one of the most important documents which has ever come before the legislature. Replete with evidence as to the injustice and cruelty with which Aborigines have hitherto been treated, and the pernicious effects which have resulted to them from their intercourse with European nations, it abundantly proves the necessity of immediate legislative interference.’ [p.iii]. Britain chose to ignore most of the Report’s findings and recommendations. Instead, it accelerated the process of dispossession and consequent mass killing. The state sponsored genocidal process was therefore intentional and considered. Mammon won. [See FWAYAF Recollections.. for a transcript of the report so far as it affected New Holland.] 19 Negative feedback: Redirect part of the system output back to the input as a way of improving the quality of the output. [Macquarie] In systems theory for biological systems, it refers to being able to adapt or modify behaviour, based on learned experience. For example: to inhibit squatting, limit the amount of immigration and the supply of available land, subject to effective criminal penalties; to reduce or eliminate mass killing, quickly prosecute any frontier violence against Aboriginals. The tragedy is that none of this was done by Government, because it chose not to, that is, the process was intentional.

15

A process model decomposes a process into its subordinate components (or sub-

processes and actionable components20) and their relationships. When a process is

instantiated, for example the occupation process,21 we expand the type instance of an

actionable component (say enact legislation) or related set of components within the process

into a specific case, typically an event. For example, one actual instantiation of the

actionable component enact legislation within the occupation process is: enact the 1842

NSW waste land legislation to open the frontier for settlement, when no consideration or

thought was given by the British Government as to what was to happen to dispossessed

Aboriginals, who were simply removed or in many cases exterminated. Murdering Creek is a

case in point. When Aboriginals in any area resisted, including those on the Sunshine Coast,

armed force was used against them. As Aboriginal numbers dropped, remnant members of

different tribes were rounded up and held in detention centres.22 Their incarceration was

progressively given legal effect by the different states from 1860 until just after the turn of

the 19th century by punitive racist legislation (in Queensland, this is what Aboriginals

Positive feedback: Redirect part of the system output back to the input, to increase the amplification. [OED] For example: increase the amount of uncontrolled land sales by accelerating the level of immigration and then alienating ever more land, without any regard for prior Aboriginal ownership; increase the amount of runaway frontier violence against Aboriginals by reducing accountability and any fear of prosecution. Positive feedback is the favoured model for efficient ethnic cleansing. It leads to collective behavioural dysfunction. The role of feedback in systems theory is set out in the Appendix, within the context of the occupation process. 20 Actionable components are also called repeatable activity strings. 21 The model for the occupation process is set out in the Appendix. 22 Aboriginal depopulation as a result of Government policy extracted a fearful toll, reducing pure bred Aboriginal numbers by over 90% in a period of 120 years up to 1911, although known Government massacres continued up to 1928. But remnant populations remained, scattered across the continent, homeless and destitute. Government devised a new policy of establishing a system of reserves or detention centres to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’ as Daisy Bates once expressed it. The policy was far from humane. We use a similar system today, for illegal immigrants, although their treatment is much less oppressive. The reserve legislation, enacted by the different states between 1860 and 1909, gave them wide powers to regulate all aspects of Aboriginal lives: 1860 South Australia, 1869 Victoria, 1897 Queensland, 1905 Western Australia, 1909 New South Wales. The legislation variously restricted freedom of movement, permitted the theft of children, allowed the management of wages, controlled the right of marriage, and restricted the use of any personal property. These punitive powers peaked in the 1930s. The detention system was intended to separate Aboriginals from whites, an apartheid policy. It was the second stage of Lemkinian genocide, a period of repression, incarceration and subjugation, where Aboriginal cultures and societies were deliberately destroyed. The perpetrators have never been made accountable. [BringingThem Home: Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, 1997, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney; Prentis, Malcolm, A Study in Black and White: The Aborigines in Australian History; Attwood, Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A documentary history; Chesterman, John; Galligan, Brian; Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship]

16

fearfully recall as ‘Living Under the Act’),23 later extended through the post-federation White

Australia Policy24 to apply to all non-white races.

An event flow shows the chronological sequence of bounded case instances, usually

for some defined process of interest. An example of a case instance is the way in which the

Murdering Creek event (and associated events, related by common triggers) instantiates the

occupation process.25 Fact based analysis will help disclose the events, which are generally of

the form [on condition] [something happens]. Events are testable assertions of facts, open to

verification or falsification. A causal chain is a string of event conditions (or triggers),

connected through some root cause. It follows that the set of event conditions is also bounded

and therefore predictable, within some probability envelope defined by intentionality, as are

the events they trigger.

We will develop models for the Murdering Creek event throughout this document.

The models will help us delineate the complexities and open new questions regarding the

political uses of ethnic cleansing, which we investigate further in this series: For We Are

Young and Free. The analytical models will allow us to anchor some or all myths in a

determinable reality.

Myths and reality

Myth is the handmaiden of reality, a more onerous citizenship. Australia would now be a

different place if Britain had recognised Aboriginal rights from the beginning.26 Imperial

Britain would not tolerate resistance to the occupation process, as the pastoral frontier

23 In Queensland, this legislation was called The Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. Variations of this Act were legislated as late as 1972, under amendments to the Queensland Aboriginal Act. The Act and its variants gave effect to a Government apartheid policy, later adopted by South Africa after consultation with the Queensland administration. 24 Immigration Restriction Act 1901 25 The event flow model for Murdering Creek is set out in Part 3, Conclusion. 26 Just before the time of Cook’s declaration of sovereignty over East New Holland, Britain had developed the juridical argument that it could take possession of an area simply because it ‘knows no sovereign’, that is, if no recognized European sovereign had made a claim, therefore it belonged to ‘no one’, certainly not the indigenous inhabitants. This British argument was based heavily on the tortured reasoning of Blackstone, the influential 18th century British jurist who eventually produced the four volume Commentaries on the Laws of England between 1765 and 1769. Blackstone’s work acknowledged Vattel’s 1759 (first English edition) Law of Nations (four books). Vattel set out certain principles for the leaders of nations to follow within and across their nations’ borders, including the rules for claiming sovereignty (as was about to happen in New Holland for example) and rules for waging a ‘just war’ (which soon became realized with the extermination of Aboriginals in the ensuing race war).

17

advanced. Behaviours hardened. Aboriginal dispossession and extermination followed.

Australia became awash with blood, each massacre like that at Murdering Creek achieving

the elements of myth, a fractal pattern of homicide. Pastoral triumphalism was a defining

illness that shaped our nation, with mass killings27 carried on the inexorable wave of a febrile

squatter tsunami, buoyed on Government resolve to open the land for settlement, blind to the

human cost on the indigenous inhabitants and owners, a cost measured in continent wide

ethnic cleansing.28

Some group affective disorders can be statistically normative within a certain

population, although they are clearly aberrational (or deviant) against some independent

objective measure. For example, the deliberate and wilful excesses of Nazism29 compared

with other non-fascist European states (as determined by the Nuremberg War Crimes

Tribunal), or the more recent 1994 killing frenzy in Rwanda under the unblinking eyes of the

United Nations (where Rwandan Hutus were later prosecuted ex parte).30 Such collective

psychosocial pathological behaviour may be self-reinforcing through group selection and

forcible coercion, as was colonial occupation of Australia. Any military organisation has a

similar behavioural determinant: killing is not ‘normal’; soldiers have to be desensitised to

causing lethal harm.

For early Australia, killing Aboriginals was ‘normal’ and acceptable. Nevertheless,

from their writings, many settlers clearly knew it was also morally wrong. But settlers were

rarely troubled by conscience. In the absence of scrutiny, morality was optional. The frontier

was a big place, where women were scarce. An Aboriginal was no match for a heavily armed

squatter or policeman, where the law of the bush prevailed. Quite often, the moral trade-off

became an economic judgment, the life of a cow or the life of a native. Settler society and its 27 Comparative genocide research has many current investigators, among them Valentino, who notes the overlap of 20th century genocide with mass killing, which he subtypes into a) dispossessive mass killing (communist, ethnic or displacing to claim territory) and b) coercive (when conventional means fail to defeat an opponent, terrorist, or overcoming resistance). Aboriginal mass killing in this typology is therefore both dispossessive and coercive. [Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, 2004. 28 There is a curious observation. It was men who conducted the killing, and men alone. Would a matriarchy have had a different outcome? 29 There was some German dissent against the policies and practices of Nazism, but the political machine ruthlessly suppressed any disagreement: the State killed around 77,000 civilians for various forms of resistance to autocratic Nazi policies. Most Germans supported Hitler’s regime because of the political stability he brought. [Hoffmann, Peter (1996), The History of the German Resistance 1933 – 1954, p. xiii] 30 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/ictr/ictr.html

18

foraging economy derogated Aboriginals as ‘vermin’ and ‘black crows’, and an impediment

to ‘progress’. The British occupiers inured themselves to carrying out en masse Aboriginal

homicide, mass killing. Civilisation demanded that it should exterminate the weaker race.31

So did the utilitarian argument of the greater good.32 The prize was land and the possibility

for self-enrichment. Compassion became an orphan.33 Where was the monetary value in

concern for those whom we cause misfortune and suffering, for those we kill? It was the

opposite: Removing Aboriginals caused property values to rise. Aboriginals who resisted

were exterminated, body-by-body, tribe-by-tribe, culture-by-culture.34 The lack of settler

moral culpability became financially self-rewarding for industrious pastoralists and

speculative property owners. Pastoralists traduced the dispossessed Aboriginal victims as

causing their own demise by being subhuman (a form of ’blaming the victim’ that is still

prevalent today), or causing a feral threat to property and the economic wellbeing of their

upstanding owners. Darwinian Theory was later invoked as the cause of their rapid

disappearance, because they were ‘unfit to survive’, with some ‘mysterious agency’ at work

in their demise.

However, this was no Act of God or Law of Nature. The real reason was a debased

and inhuman colonial pastoral society, whose values came from a flawed British class-based

hierarchy obsessed with power, property and possessions. The real reason was genocidal land

expropriation, the frenzy for land and its resources, no matter the human cost. The real reason

was a racist culture. Evans estimates that, in Queensland in 1862, the pastoral frontier was

advancing at the rate of 200 miles a year (about 320 kms).35 The various Governments across

Australia oiled the occupation process with Aboriginal blood, as the pastoral frontier

31 Their doom is to be exterminated; and the sooner their doom to be accomplished – so that there be no cruelty – the better will it be for civilization. [Anthony Trollope (1875), Trollope’s Australia, edited by Hume Dow, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Sydney, 1966, p. 141. 32 John Stuart Mill (1863), Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, Dent, 1971: 1 – 38. But whose good? And who should decide? For Britain, the national interest determined right action. 33 Bob Dylan, perhaps, expressed this better than most: Goodness hides behind its gate. 34 […] there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. [...] The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker. [Charles Darwin (1845), The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’: 431 – 436]. In his ‘mysterious agency’ hypothesis, Darwin appears to be arguing that Aboriginal extinction was a ‘law of nature’ rather than the result of British violence. 35 Evans, Raymond, ACROSS THE QUEENSLAND FRONTIER in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, eds Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster (2003): 63 – 75.

19

inexorably advanced, massacre by massacre. Queensland achieved the reputation of having

the most violent police organisation in Australia’s history. The Queensland Government

stiffened its commitment to a policy of ethnic cleansing just before the time of the Murdering

Creek massacre. The Queensland settlers cheered, lifted by their Government’s ‘dispersal’

policy, which aimed to clear the land for the benefit of pastoralists and other invasive

occupiers. To misquote Tolstoy: every massacre is unique in its own way; but each shows a

similarly unhappy pattern. The occupation process pushed Aboriginal society to the margins,

where many remain today, alienated and without hope, the easy victims of further repression.

As the Aboriginal Protector G.A. Robinson sadly and presciently observes in one of

his journal entries for 1841 in Victoria – where were the Aboriginals to go?36

Where are the natives to go?37 Question: the settlers or rather squatters do not allow

the natives to stop at their home or out stations, then where are they to go? As many

of the squatters claim for their runs from 2, 3 and 400 square miles of country, the

home station and out station, in many instances in a bad water country, secure all the

water and the sheep and cattle graze the intermediate space. Then where are the

natives to go? Where are they to procure food? Or are they to live? Are they to throw

themselves on the mercy of other tribes because no British humanity exists in the

hearts of British Australian squatters towards the original occupants of the soil?

The legacy of Australian racism

Well into the 20th century, Australia remained racist. Arguably we still are. We remain

defiantly unapologetic for the past. We maintained discriminatory legislation that denied

equal human rights for Aboriginals, including the right to vote, or the right to a fair wage, or 36 Journals of G.A. Robinson, May to August 1841 (ed. Presland), Victorian Archaeological Survey, VAS 11, entry for 31 July. Robinson was the appointed Aboriginal Protector for Victoria in the early 1840s, but without any legal power to stop the killing or prosecute the perpetrators, he became an observer (only) to Aboriginal destruction, with La Trobe and his appointed administrators passively looking on, and allowing the process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing to continue as Government policy. 37 The answer to Robinson’s question ‘Where are they to go?’ was quickly answered across all parts of Australia. They ‘disappeared’ and not through some ‘mysterious’ process. Ray Kerkhove makes the point well, when he writes about the disappearance of most of the Kabi along the Sunshine Coast in a six part series of articles called ‘Where did they go?’ The articles were Buderim’s contribution to the celebration – if that is the right word - of the 150-year anniversary of Queensland’s statehood. Kerkhove was trying to make Queenslanders aware that Queensland was founded in blood. Sadly, if the blogosphere is an indication, many Queenslanders are already aware of their bloody history, but simply do not care. Queensland, the home of Hansonism, Jo Bjelke Petersen and far right politics, has a reputation as the most redneck state in Australia, perhaps a lingering behavioural echo of its violent and racist past.

20

the right to reasonable housing and health care. We ignored their third world living

conditions. We used the police as a hard fist of oppression against Aboriginals and the police

responded enthusiastically. The Returned Servicemen’s League denied membership to

Aboriginal soldiers.38 Many bars, hotels, and cafes refused to serve Aboriginals. Public

places, including hospitals, public baths, and cinemas, were often segregated or colour-

barred. We did not allow Aboriginals to own land, except for one or two small exceptions.

Apartheid was on display but unacknowledged. We were indifferent or hostile, but rarely

sympathetic. We wanted the Aboriginals to go away. Perhaps we still do.

Racism towards Aboriginals remains overt, although generally and publicly denied.

However, our denial is in the breach. Ask any average Australian today about Aboriginal

dispossession and you will get a range of responses, generally cynical and unsympathetic:

‘They were not as competent as the Maoris in defending their land, so they deserved

to lose it’. ‘They did nothing to cultivate or improve the land, so they deserved to lose

it’. ‘We shot them out, and moved the remainders to reserves39, to die off. They were

vermin’. ‘Why bring up the past, it’s no longer relevant or useful’. ‘They were

cannibals, who ate their babies, so were inferior to the whites, and deserved what they

got’. ‘I am a third worlder in my own country, after immigrants and Aboriginals’.

‘Yes, the Aboriginals were mistreated, but I didn’t do it, so I’m not responsible’, ‘Why

do Aboriginals deserve land rights? What about my rights?’

And so it goes: the chatter of racism and racist sentiment, reflecting normative but

dysfunctional behavioural values, unmodified by the formal constraints and obligations of a

Bill of Rights, with the general rejection of ‘black arm band’ history. Such similar racist

twitter was also endemic in 19th century squatter recollections, public enquiries, private

letters among family members and anonymous letters to newspapers, all responding to

vociferous Government antipathy towards the original inhabitants, when squatters largely

dominated the seats of power.

38 Curthoys, Ann, (2002), Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers, Allen & Unwin. 39 For a list of Queensland reserves, see www.library.uq.edu.au/fryer/1967_referendum/image2a.html courtesy of Fryer Library, Queensland.

21

The role of property ownership in colonial genocide

For Britain, the value of property was an overriding priority; indigenous human life was not.

Britain classified Aboriginals as a lower order of humanity, an ethos later supported by

pseudo scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Settler society marked the work of dispersal

with a sense of imperialistic self-justification, a heroic struggle to establish British

civilization, at that time in Australia a predominantly pastoral society, in a supposedly harsh

environment. Settlers aspired to landed wealth, while overcoming adversity and minimally

‘improving’ the land with the occasional ragged timber fence and primitive slab hut, whose

walls were often drilled through by auger to create loop holes or embrasures, where a stock-

keeper’s musket or rifle could project its authority on any passing Aboriginal.

Pastoralists valued their property: cattle and sheep, exclusive grazing land, and free

rights to water. Aboriginal society valued the extensive ties of kith and kin, families and

children, culture and lore, moiety and polity. The dreamtime and song lines, totems and

traditions, bora and ceremonies, paintings and petroglyphs, land and water, country and

game, these were valued.

The British occupation forcibly swept Aboriginal values away through a sustained

process of ethnic cleansing and the violent destruction of their society. There was a white

culture of repressive, homicidal behaviour that was led by Governments and pastoralists, as

settler sovereignty inexorably moved from de facto (where it was simply assumed) to de jure

(where it was legislated). Aboriginals had no rights to land in British law, and no direct voice

in Government.40 In effect, they became invisible. The next logical step was to remove their

physical presence entirely, to force their invisibility. That the process was not completely

successful was more due to logistics than morality.

The failure of British humanitarian policy

The British Government had repeatedly set out the need for Aboriginal and pastoralist to

share the land, knowing that this usufructuary policy was entirely impractical. Shared land

use was never regulated, so it was widely ignored.

The words were a pious smokescreen, presumably meant for posterity. When

pastoralists drove off the game and restricted Aboriginal access to water, how could this be

sharing? When police and marauding bands of pastoralists could slaughter with impunity?

40 With the belated 1967 referendum, Aboriginals were finally allowed to vote and own land, on paper at least.

22

How could the land be shared, when Aboriginals began to protect their rights to a traditional

livelihood in the land of their ancestors by spearing encroaching livestock, with pastoralists

and paramilitary police then inflicting exemplary ‘punishment’ to ‘teach the savages a

lesson’? When the life of a sheep or cow had more value than that of an Aboriginal? When

Britain did not allow Aboriginals to own land, or refused to cede control to the Aboriginals in

any form? When the British Crown could alienate Aboriginal land, with no right of redress?

When Aboriginal access to their ancestral land and totems was trespass?

The only way to share land was for the Aboriginals to become wraiths, lacking a

material existence. Extermination was a solution. Or physical removal to detention centres.

Or eugenics and induced sterilisation through venereal disease. Or stealing children, and

denying marriage to full-blacks. Or limiting the possibility of Aboriginal procreation by

sexually enslaving women, by killing or removing the men, by forced miscegenation, by

black velvet. Women were scarce in the bush.

The outcome was wholly predictable and completely avoidable, with a different

British mindset that limited the rapacious Government allocation of huge swathes of

Aboriginal land to pastoralists and speculators, and rigorously protected the legal rights of

Aboriginals to the traditional enjoyment of their tribal country. Britain had no such intention.

It could force the Aboriginals to bow before British might. The Aboriginals could be beaten

and subjugated. So they were. When a race is dispossessed, the rules of the oppressor apply.

We live with the past today, although it is often misremembered or forgotten.

What future for post-colonial Australia?

Like the forces built up by the movement of tectonic plates, we should not ignore the

cumulative effect of our murderous past. The involved processes are as relevant today as they

were then. The invasive occupation process is now extending to the environment, with

significantly greater potential damage than colonial Imperialism and the policies of human

subjugation. Our adaptation need not be blind, but it can be wilfully self-serving and

obdurate. Human behaviour is often slow to change where self-interest (particularly financial)

is threatened. However, the scope of meaningful and relevant societal balance sheets should

be much broader than this. If we subrogate costs off the balance sheet, it does not make them

go away.

23

For collective accounting, Gross Domestic Product is not the only measure,41

certainly not the best, and may cause great harm in the context of an increasingly degraded

biosphere. Britain’s policies and practices in Australia were a comprehensive failure, if we

count the huge cost to Aboriginal society. Self-governing colonies continued the destruction.

We should learn from the mistakes. History should be accountable. In the general and

intentional absence of legal precedents and binding evidence, myths may help us in the way

we investigate history, given the appropriate tools. Understanding the processes and people

involved in causing the demonstrable mistakes of the past may be the key to modifying our

shared behaviour. Or it may not. But at least it will be an informed choice. The alternative is

the tired and self-serving argument of reflexivity.

The politics of denialism

Reflexivity is ‘the standards of the time’ defence that we cannot judge the past by the

standards of the present. This neatly reframes the accountability debate into one of legally

understood ‘standards’. It means that we can ignore any responsibility or reparation for past

actions beyond a certain time.

As Chris Cunneen and Julia Grix point out:

by understanding the ‘standards of the time’ to be the standards imposed through

particular governmental policies and practices there is the denial of alternative

accounts and understandings. Historical truth becomes the truth of imperial power.

History as a process favours the victors: it is their records, their accounts, their

motivations, which are moulded by law to form the narrative account of what

happened and why it happened. 42

By this ‘standards of the time’ logic, it follows that in fifty years time, historians and

lawyers will continue to argue that, although the policies and practices at the beginning of the

21st century allowed (for example) climate change to accelerate, the government of that

earlier time cannot be criticised or be held to account, because they were acting as they

41 FWAYAF The Political Uses of Australian Genocide examines this issue. 42 Chris Cunneen, Julia Grix, The Limitations of Litigation in Stolen Generation Cases, AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper # 15, Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney Law School, 2004 : 41, 42. http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/research/dp/DP15.pdf

24

thought to be appropriate. Clearly, it is a flawed, if not false, view. We who are living

through this period feel powerless to change Government anti-scientific ideology that

promotes short-term economic advantage over a significant cost to later generations. In a

similar way, many people who lived through Aboriginal ethnic cleansing knew that it was

wrong, but society of the time was persuaded by the argument of economic advancement and

self-enrichment.

In 1999, Cubillo and Gunner, two Aboriginal men, claimed reparation for being removed

against their will, some of the ‘stolen generation’. The Commonwealth poured huge amounts

of money into fighting the case. The plaintiffs won, with the Court agreeing that they had

indeed been ‘stolen’, but they were refused reparation, because of the ‘standards of the time’

argument, that Governments were acting ‘with the best of intentions’, as though to justify

forcible detention, stolen wages, stolen children, and fearful discrimination. So the

Commonwealth won. A precedent was set. Reparation would not be possible under

Commonwealth law. 43

Even when the International Criminal Court agrees that genocide has occurred (for

example, 2007, regarding the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina), retroactive

reparation is legally difficult under the Convention, although the International Law Court has

established Articles on State Responsibilities, which in principle allows compensation to be

paid (Article 36). 44

We should not let Government decisions today escape scrutiny in the future. For this

reason, we must challenge the argument of reflexivity, if our future is not to repeat itself. The

past must be accountable, just as our actions must be sometime hence. Analytical history may

help us prepare the evidence. Standards of morality and compassion should be our guide.

Deconstructing the myth of Murdering Creek may be a small contribution to a much greater

investigative effort, which seeks to understand our recent history through analytical methods

that include systems theory and the effect of policy driven feedback (both positive and

negative) in determining the shape of our society. 43 Cubillo and Another v Commonwealth [No 1] (1999) 89 FCR 528, Cubillo and Another v Commonwealth [No 2] (2000) 103 FCR 1, Cubillo and Another v Commonwealth [No 3] (2001)112 FCR 455, also see Chris Cunneen and Julia Grix, The Limitations of Litigation in Stolen Generations Cases, AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper, Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney Law School, 2004: 7 – 9, 13 – 23. http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/research/dp/DP15.pdf 44 See Christian Tomuschat, Reparation in Cases of Genocide, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Volume 5, 2007, OUP http://www.haguejusticeportal.net/Docs/Miscellaneous/Tomuschat_commentary_English.pdf

25

The implications of Lemkinian genocide in Australia

Unfortunately the process of systemic and imposed Aboriginal disadvantage continues today

(not just in Queensland, but also across Australia), with trans-generational poverty and poor

health, grossly inadequate housing and sanitation in some communities, a disproportionately

high Aboriginal carceral population, and lingering trans-generational despair, all of which

particularly affect remote settlements, where they are away from the public gaze. Yet

successive Commonwealth Governments rule out any treaty or reparation,45 and the

Constitution remains racist in key sections,46 with no moderating Bill of Rights on the

horizon.

If Australia needs a mirror for its morality, it only needs to visit the misnamed

Aboriginal town of Utopia, a beacon of public policy in the Northern Territory, or make a trip

to almost any remote Aboriginal community in Queensland or Western Australia (although

other states are not exempt). Here we will see the end stages of a prolonged genocidal process

on clear display, examples of a problem that is widespread throughout Australia, and which

Australians, largely, choose to ignore.

Murdering Creek was only one little known massacre of many, in a savage war for the

land and settler supremacy, a history that now whispers from the great Australian silence,

barely audible in the cacophony of economic determinism.

Recognising the crime of Australian genocide

We are beginning to live in a much smaller and more parochial world, where right wing

politics dominates our national agenda, with big business holding the effective balance of

power, and where ‘black’ can be argued to be ‘white’. For example, consider the slogan

‘coal is our future’, where ‘what’s right’ is reframed as ‘not yet’, because of the suggestion it

would bring down our way of life. A similar argument was expressed in the past, denying

Aboriginal enfranchisement or rights to their land or the rights to a fair wage for their labour

or the right to have a family.47

46 Section 25 has been used by past Governments to disenfranchise Aboriginals. Section 51 (xxvi) allows the federal government to pass racially discriminatory legislation. 47 There was a Government policy at one time (during the first half of the 20th century) to ‘breed out’ the ‘recessive Aboriginal trait’ through eugenics, a policy championed by Auber Neville, which Governments now argue was ‘well-intentioned’ because it encouraged (or forced) Aboriginal assimilation for their greater good.

26

If we cannot bring ourselves to recognise the crime of genocide, it is more than

symptomatic. We have a similar conflicted situation today with refugee mistreatment, where

it is deemed proper for the Australian Government to deny refugee status to damaged people

who are at risk, because the responsible minister invokes the über argument of national

interest above human rights. Or if not proper, we construct new legislation to at least make

our political behaviour legal. In a related manner, the rights of Aboriginals continue to be

made subordinate to excessive policing, imposed disadvantage and harsh economics, with

Governments running away from accepting the reality of retroactive genocide and

appropriate reparation. We are running away from our social responsibilities, just as we did in

times past, when economic interests overrode human rights.

The Kabi of the Sunshine Coast, which includes the area of Murdering Creek,

suffered fearful depredations at the hands of the Queensland Government and settler society,

but no individual or any Government representative was ever brought to account. Many of

those who were responsible, either directly or indirectly, became respected and revered by

their fellows, people such as William Chippindall, as we will see. The perpetrators of the

Murdering Creek massacre are an example, a trope for trenchant racism, where the black

hordes were to be cleared from the land for the common British good. What happened to the

Kabi at Murdering Creek also happened across the pastoral frontier, until Aboriginal

subjugation by the Government driven process of occupation was complete.

Would the Murdering Creek massacre have happened if the Queensland Government

had a different policy, a non-genocidal policy, which recognised Aboriginal rights to their

land? It is extremely unlikely. All the Queensland Government had to do, when it encouraged

faster settlement, was to set aside swathes of land for the use of the Aboriginals, much as the

Gipps Government set aside a bunya reserve for the Kabi in 1842, which the Queensland

Government repealed in 1860 as one of its first pieces of legislation. All the Government had

to do was control the rate of pastoral settlement, regulate usufructuary land use, formulate a

treaty, and punish white settlers who took the law into their own hands. All the Government

had to do was to control the rate of land alienation and immigration. All the Government had

to do was uphold the law, where black and white races were treated equally. All the

Neville continued to defend the policy, even when he saw the harmful consequences. [No matter what we do, they will die out, Auber Octavius Neville, Address to the Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Canberra, 21 APRIL 1937]. The full document is transcribed in FWAYAF Recollections from a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier.

27

Government had to do was resile from its ‘dispersal’ policy, where Aboriginals on their own

land could be treated as trespassers and shot. The word would quickly have spread that the

land belonged to Aboriginals, and its use would have to be earned. Racism would have been

discouraged. William Chippindall and others of his kind would not have believed they were

above the law or that they could kill with impunity; nor would the police. Therefore, we can

conclude that Aboriginal genocide was the result of Queensland Government policy and, as a

result, was coldly intentional. The Murdering Creek event becomes an instantiation, one of a

multiplicity, of the Lemkinian genocidal process for Queensland. Other states followed a

similar pattern.48

Murdering Creek reprised

This brings us back to the myth of Murdering Creek. Sometime during the early pastoral

invasion of the Sunshine Coast, between 1842 and 1880, David Bull49 reported the anecdote

that a party of eight men, including the Yandina Station manager, ambushed a number of

Aboriginals who were fishing from canoes on Lake Weyba, quite near the present town of

Noosa, and massacred some number of them. Historians have told and retold the story many

times, but have never been able to establish its veracity. The massacre acquired the

characteristics of yet another ripping yarn, one of an untold number, as the pastoral frontier

continued its bloody advance.

In itself, the myth of Murdering Creek is relatively unimportant, until we consider that

if we can confirm the circumstances, we are then in a position to open up any and all such

‘myths’ to the tools of analytical history. Violent myths form a large part of our narrative

history, and are far too easily dismissed or ignored. There has never been a forensic

examination of the silt bed near the likely Murdering Creek massacre site. There was never

an investigation of the massacre. Massacres were accepted as commonplace by settler

society, who traduced Aboriginals as feral pests, who had to be ‘removed’ for the sake of

economic progress.

Now, for the first time, we may be in a position to verify the facts of the Murdering

Creek ‘myth’ and determine a likely date, with the names of some of those involved, together

with the overarching procedural triggers and actions that shaped the event and gave it

48 This pattern is the subject of FWAYAF Recollections of a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier 1788 – 1928. 49 David Bull, Short Cut to Gympie Gold: 33 – 34. We will examine this anecdote in a later chapter.

28

context. Perhaps, for the first time, we are now able to apply analytical methods to any such

frontier myth, which collectively comprise the mass killing of a very large number of

Aboriginals between 1788 and 1928,50 with the direct homicidal toll up at least 66,000 and

possibly double that number in Queensland alone.51 The cumulative deaths for all reasons

associated with the British invasion between 1788 and 1928 are considerably higher again,

amounting to over 1 million Aboriginals across Australia, all of whom died prematurely and

without proper recognition of the great harm done to them, not even today.52

So this is the story of a place called Murdering Creek on the Sunshine Coast in

Queensland, and the myth surrounding its toponymy. We will use Bull and Low’s Murdering

Creek anecdotes as a partial basis for a case study into how we can analyse myths generally.

We will invent new methods and tools to help us in this purpose of disambiguating history.

We will anchor the analytical framework for the Murdering Creek myth in its associated

contextual history, allowing us to explore with new insights into the forces that shaped our

nation. We will show how the Murdering Creek event is a type instance, one of a multiplicity,

in the Occupation Process. For, ultimately, Murdering Creek was not an isolated event, a

random action. It was the inevitable consequence of carefully constructed Government

legislation and policy, a formal process, where ethnic cleansing was the acceptable downside

50 This was the date of possibly the last, large-scale massacre in Australia, at Coniston in the Northern Territory, when a marauding police party, led by George Murray, killed 31 Aboriginal men, women and children, although Murray boasted of 70. The perpetrators were exonerated, the investigation piecemeal. The factual circumstances of the Coniston massacre are set out in FYAYAF Recollections... Deaths can be fast and brutal; they can also be slow and sustained. Aboriginal malnutrition, preventable disease, inadequate health care and despair driven suicides are just as effective as extermination, and continue today, unchecked by any adequate Government humanitarian policy, having commenced to erode Aboriginal health from the 19th century, after an area was ‘pacified’. See for example, Noel Loos (1976), Aboriginal – European Relations in North Queensland, 1861 – 1897, Part III, PhD Thesis: 456 – 523. Noel discusses the’ doomed race’ theory, prevalent in the 19th century (and pre-dating separation), when British settlers noted the accelerating decline in Aboriginal numbers, caused (they preferred to believe) by some ‘mysterious’ agency unrelated to dispossession. Darwinian theory was regularly invoked, as this absolved the settlers. In North Queensland, the ratio of deaths to births in the pacified areas was three to one [quoting figures in the Minutes of Evidence, 1861 V&P]. http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/10414 A subjugated race lives without hope. Trans-generational (epigenetic) disease can result, the result of systemic alienation and despair. A transcript for the Coniston massacre is available at FWAYAF Recollections from a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier. 51 Raymond Evans, a highly respected historian, has exhaustively examined with Robert Orsted-Jensen the Queensland historical record of ‘collisions’. Through a careful and painstaking process, they have been able to revise upwards the number of Aboriginal deaths due to homicide. The number killed is quite sobering. The number for Queensland exceeds the Australian casualties during WWI. The Australian War Memorial still refuses to recognize the largest, longest and most destructive war in our history. Politicians still earnestly encourage us to forget our murderous past and focus on our achievements in an attempt to rewrite history, surely as culpable as the original ethnic cleansing. 52 See Gibbons, For We Are Young and Free, Recollections from a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier, 2014.

29

to social progress, measured by the greater good of mostly white British settlers and the

Government that supported them, people with names and roles who took part in the

destruction of Aboriginal society. These people should be accountable. Instead, we have

allowed many of them to retain a sanitised and embellished contribution to Australia’s

history.53 This makes us all complicit. It also makes our history unreliable, to the extent that

we may have distorted or misrepresented the verifiable facts, or cherry picked the evidence to

suit how we imagine ourselves, to create a nation building myth for the generations.

53 As an example, the biographical details in the Australian Dictionary of Biography tend to hagiography, another form of myth or constructed reality, by omitting certain inconvenient facts such as the person’s role in Aboriginal dispossession. If this was our only source, we might be misled.