Back in my workroom, books by historians piled up on my desk. As the days of summer wore away, I kept scribbling notes and sorting them in folders.
Within a couple of months of that moment in 1788 when the Union Jack was raised, two men had been speared. As the edge of settlement moved across the country, so did a fire-front of violence that burned well into the twentieth century in the remote parts of northern Australia. There were no big battles, nothing named and famous like the Battle of Little Big Horn. This was a guerrilla war: sparks of violence varying in intensity from place to place. Settlers carried guns and used them frequently, often using the ambiguous word ‘disperse’ to describe what they were doing. Aboriginal women were kept prisoner by settlers for sexual purposes. Family groups as well as warriors were ambushed and shot or driven over high cliffs. Sometimes they were given flour laced with arsenic. Warning signs were displayed to frighten off attackers: Aboriginal ears nailed to the wall of a hut, an Aboriginal corpse hanging from a tree with a corncob in its mouth.
Settlers were speared and burned in their huts, travellers were ambushed and attacked, settler families on isolated stations were killed—men, women and children.
The historians quoted document after document, from the easily accessed governors’ despatches to the most obscure letters and journals deep in the archives. They were a revelation. Here, for example, was a settler lying in his hut at night, convinced that he was about to be attacked:
all the horrible stories I had ever heard thronged to my recollection…I began to picture to myself the dreary bush outside, and the forms that might even then be creeping up in silence…the perspiration streamed from every pore. My hearing seemed unnaturally sharpened, and the Bush seemed as noisy as it had before been silent: all round the hut I fancied I heard the cracking of dry sticks and the rustling of grass.
A policeman in Queensland in 1898 described how ‘young lubras were taken to the station for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time.’ I pored over an old photograph for a long time, trying to interpret it: a naked young Aboriginal woman stood in long grass looking woebegone while beside her a settler stared cockily at the camera. Did the long grass hide rope or chains around her ankles?
A settler wrote a letter referring to the Aboriginal people as ‘vermin’ and urging his correspondent to ‘Shoot them all and manure the ground with them!’
The murder of Aboriginal people was a crime for which white men could be hanged, and occasionally they were. That discouraged the reporting of killings. But at least two large-scale killings left an excellent paper trail because the perpetrators were brought to trial, and several of them were executed.
At Waterloo Creek in northern New South Wales in 1838 (the year Wiseman died), a large group of Aboriginal people was ambushed as they camped by a waterhole and an unknown number (accounts varied between four and 300) were killed. At Myall Creek, not far away, the Aboriginal men were sent off working and their women and children, with a few older men, were tied together, force-marched to a clearing and hacked to death. The bodies were burned: the fire was tended for a full day but a witness some time later could still see the half-burned remains of between twenty and thirty people.
Taking notes about these atrocities made me feel sick. I could feel my eyes going starey and fixed, close to tears. My pen moved slowly over the page. The last time I’d felt like this—shocked, tainted—was when, as a student, I’d accidentally come across a book full of pictures of people in the Nazi death camps.
The poisoned, dirtied feeling came from the closeness of these events. They hadn’t happened on the other side of the world. The Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres occurred within a hundred kilometres of my mother’s birthplace. They weren’t done by the Ku Klux Klanners or Afrikaners I’d been brought up to despise for their racism. These were my own people.
The perpetrators were separated from me by time and culture, that was true. Solomon Wiseman and his neighbours grew up in a crueller world than my own. And there was the logic of the situation, too, of newcomers moving into a place where other people were already living. One set of people wanted things another set already had. How could there not be trouble?
Reminding myself of that wasn’t enough to make the sick feeling go away.
But the historians drew a complex, nuanced picture of those times. Among the stories of brutality were others of honourable, even courageous behaviour by settlers. At great cost to himself, the ex-convict David Carly in Western Australia in the late nineteenth century protested to the authorities about the mistreatment of Aboriginal people:
Again I write to you…from this land of murder and slavery and fraud…I have defended these murdered Slaves to the best of my ability for 13 years and to my Complete Ruin so I will defend them to the last as I have long since given up all hope of aid from any quarter.
In South Australia in 1838 the settler Robert Cock, a Quaker, insisted on paying ‘rent’ to the Aboriginal people for the land he occupied. Other settlers wrote of their friendships with Aboriginal people. I read several accounts of white men who lived with their Aboriginal wives and children and protected them, in spite of the hostility of their own society.
All of these people, black and white, had been faced with choices about what to do in situations they’d never encountered before. They’d made their choices under the influence of all sorts of factors: self-interest, morality, peer pressure, fear. They had made both good and terrible decisions. What choices had my great-great-great grandfather made?
What choices would I have made?