I wrote The Other Side of the Frontier 25 years ago and with some anxiety asked a handful of colleagues to read the manuscript. Their encouragement prompted me to send it to several publishers whose negative responses were deeply disappointing. One publisher observed that there were already too many books about the Aborigines; the other that my manuscript had left out many significant themes and that it would need substantial revision. Feeling that the readers had not appreciated how innovative the work was, I received the support of my head of department at James Cook University, the late B.J. Dalton, and we published the book ourselves and sold it entirely by post. The venture was far more successful than we could have imagined. For weeks the departmental office was overwhelmed with orders from all around the country. The secretaries spent much of their time packing and dispatching books. A year later Penguin was keen to take the book on and over 20 years it was reprinted numerous times.
The manuscript was the fruit of ten years’ intense, if intermittent, research–of the kind that was possible for a busy tertiary teacher. By the end of that time I had worked in the major archives and research libraries all over Australia and in London as well. In 1972 I published a collection of documents entitled Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience, 1788–1939, and assorted articles in academic and literary journals. It was an exciting time to be working on Aboriginal history. There was much international interest in race relations and I had taken several honours courses which looked at a number of settler societies and their relations with indigenous people. Young scholars all over Australia were beginning to research hitherto neglected aspects of the country’s past. But living in Townsville, in a time before email, I only had limited contact with them. My most important professional associations were with an increasing number of honours and post-graduate students in my own department in Townsville.
By the end of the 1970s I had gathered together a great deal of material and had begun to feel a sense of urgency about the need to write a substantial book. My plans changed a number of times. Originally it was to be about Queensland in the nineteenth century, then eastern Australia and finally the continent as a whole from 1788 to the early twentieth century. It began to take shape as a study of the European settlers–as much as, or more than, the Aborigines–and of what they did to, planned for and thought of the blacks.
It was only when I sat down to write with several free months in front of me that I was forced to confront the stylistic problems involved in shifting the focus from settler to indigene and back again. Suddenly, and quite impulsively, I made a decision to write two books and begin with one about the Aboriginal side of the frontier and to put aside by far the larger part of my research for a subsequent book, which eventually appeared in 1987 as Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land.1 Even then there seemed to be more that needed to be said. In neither frontier books had there been much about the Aborigines–and there were many of them–who worked for and associated with the pioneer settlers. This required a third book, With the White People, which was published in 1990.2 The three books in the trilogy were, then, closely related and rested on research material quarried at much the same time from the same sources.
When I decided to begin with a book about the Aboriginal experience I was not sure that there was enough evidence to support the story. Much of what was available to me had been found by chance and for at least the first five years of research had been collected more out of curiosity than with the idea of producing a book of the kind that eventuated. When writing an introduction to the 1981 James Cook edition I observed:
The decision to concentrate attention on the other side of the frontier was quite a recent one. Initially, I was convinced, like many previous Australian scholars, that such a study would be impossible to consummate, that the evidence was too fragmentary to sustain serious scholarship, or that the Aboriginal psyche was so different that it was uniquely resistant to the historical imagination. I became convinced that both propositions were awry and in fact they gave way together as the evidence piled up as slowly and inexorably as a sand-drift.3
I am sure that much of the momentum of the narrative derived from the sheer excitement of piecing together the small fragments of information and eventually finding that they made a plausible mosaic. Oral history carried out in and around Townsville provided some of the most compelling evidence, although the resulting material was probably less important in itself than the stimulation provided to the imagination and the concurrent growth of empathy.
I recalled one occasion in particular. I was visiting a Murray Islander elder with my friends Noel Loos and Eddie Mabo. The old man orated in characteristic Island style with a loud commanding voice. He retold the stories that he had heard as a child: tales of European castaways, shipwrecks, pearl-diving and the arrival of the London Missionary Society’s teachers in 1871. One of the stories was about the appearance of a sailing ship off Murray Island. The old man vividly described the scene. His ancestors were scrutinising the ship and its occupants. They had seen Europeans at the rail just as interested in them. Indeed they were looking through telescopes or what our informant called ‘white men’s eyes’. I think that may have been the moment when the idea of The Other Side of the Frontier first took root.
The book was clearly a product of north Australia and the experiences of life there in the 1960s and 1970s, which I was later to outline in Why Weren’t We Told.4 But equally there were academic origins. I had been very impressed with the new social history and the work of English scholar E.P. Thompson with his commitment to see working-class history from below. But to write about Aborigines and their experience of white Australia was quite a different task. I attempted to explain the situation when I argued in the conclusion that the book sought to turn Australian history not upside down, but inside out.
It was only much later that I realised that what I was trying to do closely paralleled the contemporaneous work of the historians of south Asia who launched the school of subaltern studies. A month or two after The Other Side of the Frontier was published in Townsville, in Canberra Ranajit Guha wrote the preface to the first volume of Subaltern Studies, which he explained would deal with those who were subject to subordination whether expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender or office or in any other way.5 In Volume III of Subaltern Studies, which appeared in 1984, Guha emphasised his opposition to elitisms and the failure of traditional history to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny.6
In Australia the impact of European colonisation was so varied and so powerful that it would be fanciful to claim that the Aborigines were ever in a position to make their own destiny. But what The Other Side of the Frontier showed was that by reading mainly European texts against the grain, as it is often called, it was possible to create a picture of an indigenous response that was far more varied and creative than had hitherto been supposed.
In a preface to the 1982 edition I argued that the book was a major challenge to conventional ideas about Aborigines and therefore to the way most Australians viewed important aspects of their past. Even sympathetic whites, I argued, spoke as though there was a single mode of black behaviour. I believed that I had shown that there was always diversity, contradiction, competing objectives; that Aborigines behaved politically even in the most unpromising and challenging circumstances. Previously European writers had depicted a rigid, unchanging Aboriginal society unable to cope with new challenges, which had collapsed suddenly and completely. What I thought I had been able to show was that the Aborigines were curious about white society and endeavoured to incorporate new experiences within the resilient bonds of traditional culture. They reacted creatively to European ideas, techniques, language and commodities. Nor, I argued, were they a particularly peaceful or passive people as conventional studies often suggested. Frontier conflict was apparent in almost every part of Australia, though it varied in duration and intensity. While suffering disproportionately, Aboriginal clans levied a considerable toll on pioneer communities–not just in death and injury but in property loss and prolonged anxiety as well. The cost of colonisation, I argued, was much higher than traditional historical accounts had suggested.
While seeking to make Aboriginal behaviour understandable to white readers I hoped to draw parallels with the well-known experience of pioneer settlers. I wrote:
Many themes link the pioneers who looked inward to Aboriginal Australia and the tribesmen who looked outward towards the encroaching wave of European settlement. Like the white colonists the blacks were pioneers, struggling to adjust to a new world of experience and one even stranger and more threatening than the Australian environment was to the Europeans.7
In my enthusiasm I hoped that my readers would find the other side of the frontier a new and exciting province providing fresh insights and forcing a radical reinterpretation of old themes. Aborigines who experienced the massive impact of European invasion with fortitude and courage were, I argued, people who demanded our attention and respect. I wondered if they might eventually earn as much, or even more, admiration than explorers, pioneers and other traditional heroes of nationalist mythology.
The response to my book was more positive than I could have hoped for. Even our small first edition was soon sold out, while the Penguin edition of 1982 was reprinted several times over the next few years. Over 20 years total sales have amounted to about 35 000 copies. There were many favourable reviews and several literary prizes. But in that time it has been the chance conversations with readers that have given me most encouragement. They have often said that the book allowed them to see Australian history through new eyes. Over the years, singers, composers, painters, poets and film makers have told me how they have drawn on material they found in The Other Side of the Frontier. Beyond a limited number of contacts of that kind an author can only speculate about how their book has been read and received. Certainly the most moving experience I can remember was when visiting Yarrabah, the Aboriginal community near Cairns, an old man showed me his copy of The Other Side of the Frontier. I had never seen a book so worn and so used. It had been passed around the whole community. Almost everyone had read it or had it read to them.
It is an interesting experience returning to a book written more than 20 years before. One immediate question is whether it should be rewritten or amended or left as an artefact of its time. It would have been tempting to add new evidence turned up in more recent years. But much of it would have merely added to and embellished existing interpretations. One thing that has happened since 1981 is the great expansion of oral history and the placing on the record of large amounts of Aboriginal testimony associated with land claims. There is now a significant body of evidence about the experiences and reactions of those Aboriginal people who had their first sustained experience of Europeans in the twentieth century. There is clearly another, important book to be written that would complement the nineteenth-century material that makes up the great bulk of the text of this book.
Since it first appeared I have often referred to The Other Side of the Frontier, have quoted from it in many lectures, but I had not, until very recently, read it from beginning to end. What immediately struck me was just how much detail the nineteenth-century sources actually provided about the Aboriginal response to the European invasion. But what unfolds is not a simple story at all. On almost every page there is evidence of complexity. It is far from being a facile moral tale of black virtue and white turpitude. It just does not fit into that category stigmatised in the 1990s as black armband history–if indeed such a phenomenon actually exists outside the imagination of conservative commentators.
But, in retrospect, some of the criticisms of the book do have currency. As any reader will be aware the evidence I used comes from all over Australia and is drawn from every period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Underpinning the narrative is an assumption about an Aboriginal homogeneity that was never there–and a tendency to treat European settlement as an unchanging presence. These points have to be conceded. They were always there in the back of my mind. But such is the scarcity and the fragmentary nature of much of the evidence that it always seemed to be a case of doing it in the way that I did or not doing it at all.
The sad fact about Australia is that there are only a few places, and a couple of moments, when much more detailed, specific studies are possible. There was no ‘middle ground’ in Australia–that long era of American history described by Richard White when Indians, whites and mestizos mixed on terms of equality and left abundant documentary evidence behind.8 The early years at Sydney were a time when a group of capable Europeans both related closely with resident Aborigines and wrote and thought about the experience. Inga Clendinnen’s book Dancing with Strangers illustrates how creatively such documentation can be used.9 But there were few other moments like that. The early years at Perth offer another example. The Van Diemen’s Land journals and letters of George Augustus Robinson are a source still waiting for the researcher of the other side of the frontier, as are the journals and diaries of numerous nineteenth-century missionaries. But over much of the continent we are never likely to uncover more than small shards of evidence–of the kind swept up to help construct the mosaic presented here.
Another criticism voiced now and then over the last 20 years is that the history of indigenous society is written with modern anthropology in mind; that ideas taken from that discipline are then projected backwards to provide an interpretive framework. It is a practice known as upstreaming. I was always aware of this problem but I’m not sure there is any easy solution to it. It would be unthinkable to approach Aboriginal history without at least a grounding in the principal anthropological works. Having absorbed that material, it cannot be rinsed from the mind before turning to the historical record and trying to interpret the past.
Another recurring question is that of the role of the historian in writing Aboriginal history. In both editions of the book I declared my position. The work, I explained, was a white man’s interpretation, aimed primarily at white Australians. What I now presume about my family’s Aboriginal ancestry–as outlined in my recent book Nowhere People10 — does not significantly change my view on the matter. I have long believed that, while there are aspects of traditional society that are off limits to anyone without specific permission from elders and custodians, history since 1788 is the story of the interaction of indigenous people and the new settler society; and that the available and relevant records are overwhelmingly written by white men–even when they were reporting and commenting on what Aboriginal informants told them.
Over the years I have heard conflicting opinions from indigenous Australians. Indeed, some have told me in no uncertain terms that I have trespassed on their intellectual territory. Others have spoken up in my defence and many Aboriginal people have supported my work. In Townsville my friends found a different way to deal with the question. They insisted that, although I might not know it, I was actually a Murri–an observation that returned to me with great force when my family began to uncover ancestral secrets.
The intellectual criticism of the book has long been overshadowed by attacks that are political in motivation. In fact many of them come from people who give the impression of not having actually read the text, yet don’t like the idea of it. Some of the antagonism stems from my open avowal that the book could not escape the fate that awaits a political document. In the opening paragraph of both editions I nailed my colours to the mast observing that it was not ‘conceived, researched or written in a mood of detached scholarship. It is inescapably political, dealing as it must with issues that have aroused deep passions since 1788 and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future’.
It is a declaration that may need a little exegesis. The book came out of Townsville, a place where race relations were a matter of everyday concern and discussion. As a lecturer in Australian history, I found that even to raise the subject created consternation–whether expressed vociferously or in deep, thoughtful silence. Almost no-one seemed detached or dispassionate when race was considered, not even in everyday conversation. To talk openly about Aboriginal history was, in itself, a political act and was seen to be so. It would have seemed a complete misrepresentation to fail to mention the fraught context in which the book was conceived, researched and written. And no matter how the book was addressed to an Australian audience in the early 1980s it would inevitably be received politically. This seems to be even more the case today than it was 25 years ago.
The most common criticism of my work is that I make too much of frontier violence. I have never conceded this point. I think it plays a relatively small part in the text of The Other Side of the Frontier and for that matter in my work as a whole. And the conflict I refer to in chapters three and four is always placed in context in an attempt not to condemn anyone but to explain the circumstances in which violence arose. On re-reading this material I fail to find any tendency at all to moralise about specific violent incidents or to deliberately aggravate a tender white conscience.
But the section of the book that has acted like a lightning rod for continuing criticism is the one where I sought to determine how many people had died in frontier conflict. I began by mentioning the work of other scholars who had attempted to assess the death rate in specific regions of the country and then wrote:
For the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20 000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers. Secondary effects of the invasion–disease, deprivation, disruption–were responsible for the premature deaths of many more although it is almost impossible to arrive at a realistic figure.11
It was the figure of 20 000 that has caused the greatest controversy. Several points need to be made. I debated with myself whether I should attempt to arrive at an estimate of the Aboriginal death toll. I had, after all, spent ten years researching all over Australia. I decided it was incumbent on me to report what conclusion I had arrived at as a result of that research. I thought it would be evasive to do anything else. I could scarcely pretend that I hadn’t thought about the question. So it was an estimate and could not have been anything more than that. I did not think 20 000 was an excessive figure for a conflict that occurred continent-wide over a period of close to 150 years. It was a much smaller figure than other writers have suggested given the dramatic decline of the Aboriginal population after 1788. I still think it is reasonable to suppose that the death rate was somewhere near that figure. None of the detailed scholarly work over the last 20 years in books, articles and theses has persuaded me to change my mind on the matter. What still surprises me is that many Australians so clearly resist such a conclusion, despite our national obsession with our war dead in every conflict from the Boer War to the present.
I thought in 1981, as I do now, that there are far more interesting questions than the actual number who died in frontier conflict, which will always have to be a matter of speculation. There is the abiding matter of the politics of the dead or, as I asked in the conclusion, How, then, do we deal with the Aboriginal dead? Are they best forgotten or should they be celebrated and memorialised? Should they receive as much attention and reverence as white Australian soldiers who fell in battle? Should they be celebrated as warriors who died defending their way of life against an all-powerful invader? I certainly thought 25 years ago that we would have made some progress in answering these questions. But they lie there still, quite unresolved. It is time, I believe, they were faced again. Such issues were often discussed during the 1990s, the decade of the Reconciliation movement, but they seem to have disappeared from public discourse.
The most severe criticism of my estimate of Aboriginal deaths has come from Keith Windschuttle, particularly in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,12 which while focussed on early Tasmania has implications for Australia as a whole. Central to his argument is the proposition that, like many other historians, I had deliberately exaggerated the number of people killed in frontier conflict. He concluded that only about 120 Tasmanians died violently. He also reduced the conventional estimate for the pre-contact population from 5000 to 2000, the better to explain the rapid demographic decline after 1803. There is scarcely anyone familiar with Tasmanian history in the recent past who would agree with either of these figures. In his defence of his low estimate of frontier deaths, Windschuttle turned to already well-known features of the Black War. The rugged and forested terrain favoured the Aborigines, giving them advantages in both attack and escape. Convicts working in the bush were often denied guns and rarely had horses. Even when firearms were available they were cumbersome, inefficient and inaccurate.
Given these particular features of the conflict of the 1820s we would reasonably expect that the Aboriginal death toll would be greater in later decades in mainland Australia where frontiersmen were invariably mounted and armed with far better weapons. But, even if we leave these considerations aside and project Windschuttle’s Tasmanian figures across Bass Strait and into the later years of the nineteenth century, we arrive at what, for many people, may be an unexpected result. Even if we take the lowest estimate of the pre-contact population of 300 000, the presumed death rate–using Tasmania as our model for conflict–would amount to between 18 000 and 19 000: a figure not far short of my estimate of 20 000. However the contemporary view is that 300 000 is much too low a figure, and that the original population might have been twice as large, suggesting further that my contentious estimate of frontier deaths was modest indeed.
With the assistance of the University of New South Wales Press we relaunch The Other Side of the Frontier. The climate of opinion and the general knowledge of the Australian community is quite different from that in 1981. I am as curious now as I was 25 years ago to discover how a new generation of readers responds to the book.