NO DOUBT that before white settlement, the indigenous people of Australia lived in, what Thomas Hobbes called, a state of nature in which life was “nasty, brutish and short”. 
And to some extent life is more nasty, brutish and short for indigenous Australians than it is for the rest, but perhaps better than what it was in the state of nature.
There has been a transition from pre-settlement indigenous existence to post-settlement indigenous existence.
Neither states have been satisfactory. But my guess is that many, indeed most, Australians think that if some idealised Rousseauean noble-savage view of pre-settlement indigenous existence degenerated to the disadvantage we see today, that it was caused by incidental things – disease, displacement, loss of water and food resources and the like. It was a sort of unfortunate and inevitable by-product of white people landing on our shores, to which no culpability should be attached. It just happened.
Well, not so.
It may well be that the footprint of the very early history of white settlement in Australia – up to, say, 1830 – has been smothered in the sands of time, but not so the later material, particularly in Queensland.
I have just finished reading a book published a fortnight ago by Queensland historian Timothy Bottoms, “Conspiracy of Silence. Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times”.
In it he describes how the white settlers raced to the Darling Downs and its agricultural and economic fruits, irrespective of the existing owners.
This book brings us several critical insights.
First, the upshot of the Myall Creek massacre in NSW – after which seven white perpetrators were hanged – was not a salutary lesson to whites that killing the indigenous inhabitants would bring swift justice, but rather that the lesson was to keep up the killing but to make sure nobody knew about it.
Second, indigenous evidence was for a long time not accepted in white courts, so by and large killing indigenous people could be done with impunity.
Third, the widespread death of indigenous people and their displacement from their lands was not a by-product of disease or even forcible moving on, but rather was occasioned by wholesale deliberate killing – murder.
Life was not nasty, brutish and short, but nasty, brutish and shortened.
Fourth, the murders were not isolated incidents of shooting by a few recalcitrants, but wholesale massacres. Bottoms has meticulously sourced the details.
The shocking incidents are the arsenic poisonings. This is completely new to me, so I guess it is new to many Australians. In Queensland settlers left “gifts” of flour laced with arsenic or strychnine for indigenous people to take. And they died, especially the children. It does not get much more evil than that.
Fifth, the convict era was not the time of massacres, rather it was the later pastoralist time – economics drove these crimes.
Bottoms has drawn some fairly compelling conclusions. He quite rightly says, “No Australian today is responsible for what happened on our colonial frontier. But we are responsible for not acknowledging what happened. If we do not, our integrity as a nation is flawed and we are shamed as a people for perpetuating a lie.”
I, like Timothy Bottoms, grew up with a triumphalist Australian history – one of one success after the other.
We need to be more honest.
Bottoms has unearthed and collated the history to give a coherent picture –not of accidental by-product or unfortunate consequence, but of active, murderous brutality.
He cites the evidence of Archibald Meston who in 1890 was to become Protector of the Aborigines. He wrote in the weekly journal The Queenslander: “The records of those unhappy years are unspeakably ghastly in their accounts of murders of white men and slaughter of the blacks. The whites were killed in dozens, the blacks in hundreds.”
“The Conspiracy of Silence” lays out noisy piece of evidence after noisy piece of evidence that the movement of indigenous people from their lands in Queensland was nasty, brutal and murderous.
And we should now safely to assume that the less well-documented earlier history in NSW and Victorian would tell the same story.
How nasty and brutal? Bottoms writes: “British colonisation of this island continent resulted in several thousand whites being killed, and an enormous indigenous death toll, in Queensland approaching the number of Australians killed during the First World War.
This is not a case of “lest we forget” but a case of never acknowledged, let alone forgotten or remembered.
DOT DOT DOT
For once in my life I missed a credit card payment. Usually, I ride on the credit-addict’s back. I put everything on credit cards and get oodles of frequent flyer points and upgrade to business class.
How do they do it, I ask. Well, the frequent-flyer business is worth almost as much as Qantas itself.
How can that be? Well, running an airline with staff and risk and the capital cost of planes and so on is a tricky thing.
But giving a few free flights in a system that creams between 1 and 2.5 per cent off every consumer transaction is another matter. It is a dead cert for production of income.
Back-of-the-envelope figures would have 15 million Australians putting, say, $10,000 a year each on credit cards. That is $150 billion a year. And 1.5 per cent of that is a revenue of $2.25 billion a year with very little overhead – sure beats running a risky airline.
Better still, hitting recalcitrant non-payers of their full monthly balance with interest back-dated to the date of purchase of every item is eye-watering. And the interest rate hovers between an insolvency trustee’s dream of 20.5 per cent and a merely testicle-squeezing 18 per cent.
It is inexcusable usury.
Someone should see the market opportunity. There is virtually no risk in giving credit-card credit to middle class people with houses. Their mortgage is already tied in to the card as overall debt to the mortgagee debt. Down there in the 5.5 point type is a clause which says the security of the house is good for the credit card debt. So why do they charge about four times their realistic credit risk — because of the banks’ greed and a failure of some smart entrepreneur to offer the risk-free moneyed classes an interest rate commensurate with the risk.