H Reynolds - The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia

This is the first book to systematically explore the other side of the frontier, to turn Australian history, not upside down, but inside out. It establishes that it is possible to write Aboriginal history and present it to white Australians in such a way that they can understand black motives and appreciate the complexities of their tragic story. W. K. Hancocks judgement of 1930 that Aboriginal society was pathetically helpless when assailed by Europeans can be seen now as a travesty albeit still an influential one. Even today sympathetic whites speak of the blacks as the passive objects of European brutality or charity. Indeed many of the major themes of white history were mirrored on the other side of the frontier.

The Aboriginal response to invasion was much more positive, creative and complex than generations of white Australians have been taught to believe. The heroes of nationalist mythology had their little known black counterparts. The courage of European explorers pushing out into the interior was matched by that of the Aborigines who met them on the way and by others who travelled in towards the white mens settlements to observe and evaluate the interlopers. Epic journeys of discovery were not the preserve of white men. The explorers fear of black savages was echoed by Aboriginal alarm about evil spirits and malignant magic. The improvisation and adaption of Europeans settling the land was paralleled by tribesmen who grappled with a new world of experience on the fringes of white settlement. The stoical endurance of pioneer women was matched by that of their black sisters who bore children and battled to keep them alive in conditions of appalling adversity. All over the continent Aborigines bled as profusely and died as bravely as white soldiers in Australias twentieth century wars.

In the long run black Australians will be our equals or our enemies. Unless they can identify with new and radical interpretations of our history they will seek sustenance in the anti-colonial traditions of the third world. If they are unable to find a place of honour in the white mans story of the past their loyalties will increasingly dwell with the wretched of the earth. But if the Aboriginal experience is to be woven into new interpretations of Australian history changes will be necessary. We will have to deal with the blacks as equals or they will see our sudden interest in their history as merely another phase of our intellectual usurpation of their culture and traditions. We must give due weight to the Aboriginal perceptions of ourselves and they will not be flattering. Aborigines have seen so much of the dark underside of white Australia; they have lived with it for two hundred years. Blacks believe that Europeans are hypocrites. You are very clever people, an old tribesman told W. E. H. Stanner, very hard people, plenty humbug. In Aboriginal eyes the whites were invaders who came preaching the virtues of private property; people who talked much of British justice while unleashing a reign of terror and behaving like an ill-disciplined army of occupation once the invasion was effected; forcinators who pursued black women in every fringe camp on the continent but in daylight disowned both lovers and resulting offspring. Major figures of our history will have to be reassessedfrontiersmen who lavished lead on neighbouring clans; selectors who notched the handles of their Colt revolvers as readily as they ring-barked rainforest trees; jolly swagmen who at night became far from funny shagmen when they staggered into blacks camps. The high evaluation of explorers needs amendment. They were usually dependent on the expertise of their black guides; they followed Aboriginal paths, drank at their wells; slept in their gunyahs and were often passed on from clan to clan by people who constantly monitored their progress through a landscape the Europeans chose to call a wilderness.

For many years white Australians have used Aboriginal words, symbols and designs to heighten their national distinctiveness and underline their separate identity. We can scarcely wonder if others judge us in this light and use our attitude to the Aboriginal historical experience as the acid test when they come to judge if white Australians have assimilated to the continent or are still colonists at heart. If we are unable to incorporate the black experience into our national heritage we will stand exposed as a people still emotionally chained to our nineteenth century British origins, ever the transplanted Europeans.

Much of Aboriginal history since 1788 is political history. Recent confrontations at Noonkanbah and Arukun are not isolated incidents but outcrops of a long range of experience reaching back to the beginnings of European settlement. The Tent Embassy of 1972 did not launch Aborigines into Australian politics but rather reminded white Australians of old truths temporarily forgotten. The questions at stakeland, ownership, development, progressarrived with Governor Phillip and have been at the pivot of white-Aboriginal relations ever since. They are surely the most enduring issues of Australian politics and will in the long run prove to have been of much greater consequence than many questions which since the middle of last century claimed the attention of parliaments and public for a season or two.

Frontier violence was political violence. We cannot ignore it because it took place on the fringes of European settlement. Twenty thousand blacks were killed before federation. Their burial mound stands out as a landmark of awesome size on the peaceful plains of colonial history. If the bodies had been white our histories would be heavy with their story, a forest of monuments would celebrate their sacrifice. The much noted actions of rebel colonists are trifling in comparison. The Kellys and their kind, even Eureka diggers and Vinegar Hill convicts, are diminished when measured against the hundreds of clans who fought frontier settlers for well over a century. In parts of the continent the Aboriginal death toll overshadows even that of the overseas wars of the twentieth century. About 5,000 Europeans from Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn died in the five wars between the outbreak of the Boer War and the end of the Vietnam engagement. But in a similar periodsay the seventy years between the first settlement in north Queensland in 1861 and the early 1930sas many as 10,000 blacks were killed in skirmishes with the Europeans in north Australia.

How, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead? White Australians frequently say all that should be forgotten. But it will not be. It cannot be. Black memories are too deeply, too recently scarred. And forgetfulness is a strange prescription coming from a community which has revered the fallen warrior and emblazoned the phrase Lest We Forget on monuments throughout the land. If the Aborigines are to enter our history on terms of most perfect equality, as Thomas Mitchell termed it, they will bring their dead with them and expect an honoured burial. So our embarrassment is compounded. Do we give up our cherished ceremonies or do we make room for the Aboriginal dead on our memorials, cenotaphs, boards of honour and even in the pantheon of national heroes? If we are to continue to celebrate the sacrifice of men and women who died for their country can we deny admission to fallen tribesmen? There is much in their story that Australians have traditionally admired. They were ever the underdogs, were always outgunned, yet frequently faced death without flinching. If they did not die for Australia as such they fell defending their homelands, their sacred sites, their way of life. What is more the blacks bled on their own soil and not half a world away furthering the strategic objectives of a distant Motherland whose influence must increasingly be seen as of transient importance in the history of the continent. Mother England has gonethe Empire tooyet black and white Australians have still to come to terms almost two hundred years after the British established their first beach-head at Sydney Cove.