WARNING: Content may be distressing
The slippage between knowing and not knowing is a fine line.
I believe what has been spoken about around the kitchen tables of this country's squattocracy has seeped through each generation of Australians.
There is a narrative that plays out when the descendants of those who did the dispossessing recount the history of how they rid the land of blacks.
What do the families of these patrilineal lines of Jardine, Fraser and Wills, along with others, tell their children about their forebears' involvement in the Frontier Wars of Queensland?
Badtjala artist and academic Dr Fiona Foley won the top prize at the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards for her book Biting the Clouds. Source: Dominic Lorrimer
This history was recorded
A number of massacres in Australia are well known. The Hornet Bank massacre, Forrest River massacre, Myall Creek massacre and Coniston massacre are generally known, while many others are documented but lesser known to the public.
For instance, you can find memorials in the landscape to the Flying Foam massacre, the massacre of Waterloo Bay, Black Head massacre, and, although the 1851 Fraser Island massacre is documented there is no memorial at this point in time.
I am told by historians that this history is not taught in our curriculums.
This may be why Australians like to claim, "I was never told".
I differ on that position, in that, how could you not know when so much is on the public record? I remember reading The Destruction of Aboriginal Society by C.D. Rowley in 1984 which led me to create a sculpture titled Annihilation of the Blacks in 1986.
A new by Rachel Perkins adds another layer to what we may not know as a nation with Aboriginal descendants having kept their oral knowledges alive beginning with the Appin massacre.
Perkins ricochets around the country like the colonial bullets of yore.
Filmmaker Rachel Perkins says making The Australian Wars documentary was an "epic undertaking". Source: SBS
In the various colonial outposts, Australian archetypes could be described as men who had a rapaciousness to take what was not theirs from natural resources, their thefts ranging from Aboriginal women and girls to vast swathes of land. This was repeated many times over.
Every Aboriginal nation from this continent fought back in strategic retaliation against Commonwealth greed, libidinal lust, child kidnapping and land theft.
The roll call of resistance fighters and language groups begins with Pemulwuy, the Gunditjmara Resistance (1835-1849) to the many unnamed warriors.
In Tasmania, the focus is on key Aboriginal hero, Tongerlongeter. There are many individual resistance fighters who do not get a mention in this series but are held in our living memory.
As palawa man Rodney Dillon succinctly states [in the documentary], "You go to a cenotaph. None of our heroes are up on the walls, our heroes are invisible like our history."
Throughout the various re-enactments we lose ourselves in the chase, whether on foot or horseback, through a multitude of acts of violence in reprisals for land ownership.
The net is cast wide as we bear witness to prominent Aboriginal speakers on Country, academics, historians and archaeologists, each giving accounts of historical fact, scientific data and Native Police artefacts.
Legitimated through oral history of place, diaries, state archives, artist camps, memorials and skeletal remains we traverse time in this cleverly crafted epic documentary.
In the third episode, Queensland and Western Australia are covered in a series of re-enactments leading us to Native Police camps where Aboriginal men were trained in weaponry and horse riding to assist in state-sanctioned violence under white supervision.
These camps are identified by a number of historians and archaeologists (Raymond Evans, Jonathan Richards, Henry Reynolds, Heather Burke, Bryce Barker and Lynley Wallis) as operating like a paramilitary organisation.
A re-enactment of Aboriginal prisoners 'on the chain', a system once used by the Northern Territory and Western Australian Police. Source: SBS
They had all climbed up into trees, poor things, to hide – they shot them down like birds and they fell down like birds, poor things – finished…
Haunting as this is, we next travel to a community memorial located at a well for Sturt Creek Traditional Owners where detailed evidence is revealed in a fallen tree, fencing from the goat yards and one man's escape.
This surviving oral account is further supported in art and science. Evidence suggests a high-temperature fire was stoked for up to six days to hide the Aboriginal bodies by burning them.
Like the 10,000 ANZAC memorials dotted across this land with the inscription lest we forget, Aboriginal people also have a right to remember their fallen men, women and children from this nation's Frontier Wars which spanned 140 years.
Rachel Perkins poses a two-part question, "Are we ready to honestly face the past that made our country what it is — or go on living a lie"?
What this documentary lays bare is the need for a stand-alone national Frontier War Museum to be built to educate Australian citizens.
Dr Fiona Foley is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is the author of Biting the Clouds, published by UQP, 2020.
