Australia degree experience in life

B. Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds). Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003. Pp.232, illustr., AUD 39.95 (Pb.), ISBN 1-87694-441-0.

Believing that the violence of the colonisation of Australia has been overstated, Keith Windschuttle has published a series of critiques of the writings of historians and of museum displays. In December 2001, the National Museum of Australia hosted a discussion of Windschuttle's interrogation of the 'frontier violence' story. The revised papers of that occasion comprise this book. Windschuttle is sometimes labelled a 'denialist' a la David Irving. Whatever similarities there may be between these two authors, the rhetorical effect of that label is to place Windschuttle outside the conversations of humanists. (At the National Museum forum, at least one speaker was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I've experienced in academic life.) I write this review in resistance to that ostracising tendency. As I read Windschuttle, he has made two points that must be debated in the usual scholarly ways: that the evidence for some emblematic 'massacres' is weak; and that the colonists' viole nce against Indigenous Australians was the expression, in difficult circumstances, of the rule of law.

Five of the 15 substantive chapters (by Jan Critchett, Ray Evans, Deborah Bird Rose, Geoffrey Bolton, Ann Curthoys) do not cite Windschuttle or address explicitly his arguments. Critchett and Evans give valuable summaries of research documenting extensive violence in (respectively) western Victoria in the 1840s and Queensland from c. 1824 to the First World War. Common to both theatres was an Aboriginal corps of mounted police, the 'singularly most destructive institution' (p.73) of Queensland's frontiers, in Evans' view.

The most focused critique of Windschuttle comes from Lyndall Ryan who examines his debunking of the well accepted story that British soldiers inflicted a 'massacre' on Kamilaroi people at Waterloo Creek in the Liverpool Plains region of New South Wales in 1838. She briefly indicates the conflicting written evidence that an historian investigating this incident must consider. She queries Windschuttle's confidence in one official account and his lack of interest in others that undermine it. The self-discipline and honesty of the troops, she argues, was not a conclusion that he reasoned from all the available documents but a methodological premise that inclined Windschuttle to read some of the pertinent documents and to read them in a certain way. Ryan concludes that at Waterloo Creek (and, by inference, on many Australian frontiers) it was not possible for colonial authorities to bind the conduct of men with guns. Her substantive challenge to Windschuttle is thus that the rule of colonial law was an aspiration that met with many frustrations; the Waterloo Creek incident illustrates very clearly how easily the legitimate exercise of force spilled over into actions that were horribly undisciplined. It was a 'massacre--the indiscriminate shooting of people who could not defend themselves' (p.42).

The idea of 'excess' is built into the notion 'massacre'. Richard Broome in his 1988 essay 'The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare' (in M. MeKernan and M. Browne (eds) Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, St. Leonards, NSW: Australian War Memorial/Allen and Unwin) wrote: 'The savagery [of frontier fighting] was greatest during massacres. Both sides indulged in indiscriminate slaughter of helpless victims.' He gave two examples: the Myall Creek (1938) and the Cullinlaringo (1861) killings. He warned that 'the word "massacre" has been overused in describing the frontier war'. He urged us to distinguish 'massacres' from 'military routs'. Both were 'costly', but the 'massacre' is distinguished from the military rout' by the slaughter of women and children and by the killings 'at leisure' of armed men trapped in water-holes or huts. Al Grassby and Marji Hill seem to me to have made the same distinction in writing that the events at Slaughterhouse Creek (another disaster for Kamilaroi people in 1838) was 'no battle but a massacre' (Six Australian Battlefields. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1988). Broome wrote the entry on 'massacre' in The Oxford Companion to Australian History (2000, 2nd. ed). There he notes that 'massacre' is commonly used to refer 'to mass killings of defenceless Australians, but historically referred to large-scale slaughter of Aborigines'. Later in this entry he uses the phrase 'inordinate killings', a term that implies 'ordinate' killings, in short an implied distinction between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' violence? In Ian Clark's Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803-1859 (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995) massacre is defined as 'the unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a number of human beings, as in barbarous warfare or persecution, or for revenge or plunder.' This definition implies criteria for classing some acts of violence as 'necessary, 'discriminating' and as within agreed rules of warfare or policin g. To use the word 'massacre' in the history of Australian frontiers thus implies one or both of the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate force, and between force disciplined by military/policing norms and force run amok.

If Ryan's response to Windehuttle on the Waterloo Creek massacre reiterates those distinctions (if only by not repudiating them) then she may be read as pointing to a morally significant and sometimes politically powerful counterfactual history of the colonisation of Australia. In that counterfactual, the 'rule of law' could have limited the extent to which the usurping Britons used physical force to secure their dominion. This counterfactual can never lose its pertinence for Australians who wish to ameliorate the impact of a colonisation that they cannot reverse. The option of refusing to be a beneficiary of dispossession does not exist for residents of Australia, and this unavoidable degree of complicity with some level of violence has always been part of the environment in which the humanitarian tradition has asserted its pleas for the rule of some kind of law. Alan Atkinson's essay in the Attwood and Foster book on how historians can historicise 'moral disgust' invites our attention to this feature of the humanitarian tradition.

It was by exploring this counterfactual that Henry Reynolds contributed to Australians' most substantial recent ameliorative step: the High Court's recognition of 'native title' in 1992 and 1996. In a number of books, including The Law of the Land (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1987), Reynolds has invited us to see the colonial process, particularly up to the 1850s, as including a contest between Imperial prescription (echoed locally by a humanitarian lobby) to treat the colonised Aborigines in a just way and a settler colonial land hunger that tolerated no human obstacle. The triumph of rapacity over restraint--behaviourally, politically, legally and historiographically--is central to Reynolds' account of Australia's 'long nineteenth century' (1788-1928). In the 1980s and 1990s, Reynolds seems to be saying, some of the ameliorative potential of that thwarted Imperial idealism was restored to Australian public policy.