Many recent non-fiction books about the terrible violence between European settlers and Aboriginal people on the Australian colonial frontier have tended to pick a side.
But a Tasmanian academic, Nicholas Clements, has sought to bring new balance to the complex and disturbing story of the violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people in Van Diemen’s Land in his recently released book, The Black War – Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania.
It was an ambitious and culturally courageous aim given the paradigm – left or right, black or white – through which so much contemporary history of frontier violence has been presented and received in Australia since the 1990s.
In interviews promoting The Black War, Clements stressed his determination to break the “circularity” of debate that has swirled around the “history war” over frontier violence between conservative and progressive historians.
Indeed, Clements expressed hope his book would even end the history wars.
It was a view strongly echoed by the pre-eminent historian and fellow Tasmanian Henry Reynolds, who has done more, perhaps, than any other Australian since the mid-1960s to tell the deeply discomfiting truth about the violence that festers at the heart of Australian sovereignty.
But as fine and groundbreaking a book as The Black War is, I suspect such hopes are somewhat premature.
But first to the book, which focuses on the colonial settlement of Tasmania and the conflict between Aboriginal groups, settlers (including convict labourers), sealers, stockmen, troops and the roving parties that were dispatched to kill.
Clements, the descendant of settlers possibly involved in the 1824-31 war against Tasmanian Aboriginal people, tells it from the sides of both the Indigenous Tasmanians and the settlers. What emerges is a rich and textured story that lends empathy and new understanding to the motives and the shortcomings – moral and military – of all the warriors, without seeking to justify them.
Clements, an honorary research associate at the University of Tasmania, asserts that a fundamental cause of the Black War in his state – besides the colonial land grab – was sex. There were not nearly enough colonial females in the state to keep company the male settlers, convicts, sealers and soldiers, so they abducted, raped and killed the Indigenous women and girls.
“Sex continued to be a central motivation for attacking natives until around 1828, by which time killing the enemy had taken priority over raping them. There is no indication that sexual assaults decreased after this, though they probably became more a ‘fringe benefit’ of ambushes that had as their primary goal the eradication of a dangerous enemy,” he writes.
Clements has mined the archives for this nuanced story that transcends so much earlier academic work on Tasmanian and mainland frontier violence that had largely been told largely from one or other perspective, but rarely both. Each chapter is divided between “white” and “black” – a device that helps to distil an enormously complex story for a deservedly wide readership while illustrating the depth and breadth of some incredible research.
“My book, by writing two histories in parallel, confronts the reader and forces them to empathise. Even the most hardened of black armband or white blindfold [historians] has to place themselves in the shoes of both sides,” Clements told the Australian recently.
“I’ve tried to break the circularity of the [history] wars debate. I was not so much fed up with the polemics, but I recognised how eminently unhelpful they were.”
Equally controversial, perhaps, is Clements’ decision not to condemn the near eradication of Indigenous Tasmanians as “genocide”, at least according to its modern definition. Instead he argues it resulted from circumstance beyond the control even of some participants, not least the convicts, who often found themselves isolated and under attack.
He produces evidence that the war killed about 600 Indigenous Tasmanians and 220 Europeans. It is an assertion that some history warriors will not be done with.
Meanwhile Reynolds, a Tasmanian who has written numerous books about frontier war in Australia, wrote in the foreword to Clements’ book that “while reflecting upon the history wars, [it] has transcended their angry contention and has, consequently brought them to an end”.
This seems like a big call.
Tasmanian colonial violence was always the epicentre of the history wars. While the history wars, which divided academics, flared in the first decade of this century, the scene for heated, personal and angry debate about Australia’s past was set earlier – about when former prime minister John Howard adopted conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey’s term “black armband” to refer to what he viewed as an undue and growing cultural and historical emphasis on colonial violence.
Debate about frontier violence and its emphasis in Australia’s historical narrative reverberated through our national institutions, not least the National Museum of Australia, where those sympathetic to the Howard view were appointed to the board.
The debate polarised academics, who argued over the progressive proposition that frontier violence constituted a “war” and that the numbers of Indigenous Australians killed continent-wide numbered about 20,000. (Reynolds insists this figure – along with the estimate that some 3000 settlers, police and soldiers also lost their lives in frontier war – is conservative.)
Leading the prosecution for the conservative argument was Keith Windschuttle. His 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803 – 1847, rejected the concept of frontier war. He highlighted ambiguities and mistakes in the work of left wing historians and estimated the death toll on the island due to white-black conflict at perhaps 300.
Unsurprisingly, Windschuttle took almost immediate exception to Reynolds’ recent claim that Clements’ book would end the history wars.
“This is wishful thinking – it is straight out of the same manual for propaganda that once claimed the scientific debate over climate change was now settled,” Windschuttle reportedly said.
Personally, I anticipate that debate about how Australia views colonial frontier violence will probably intensify considerably in coming years.
The Australian War Memorial, which is at the forefront of our commemorations of the First World War (Australia chooses to cast it parochially as the Anzac 100 centenary), refuses to acknowledge frontier war in its displays on the basis of several nefarious arguments, not least that locally raised military units were not involved in the violence. The memorial’s director, former Howard government defence minister Brendan Nelson, is being lobbied by Indigenous leaders and progressive historians to revisit that position, but he gives no indication of wavering.
Prime minister Tony Abbott, meanwhile, has foreshadowed a determination – despite the opposition of influential reactionary commentators and some in his own party – to amend the Constitution to acknowledge Indigenous Australians.
Politicking around Abbott’s move will inevitably trigger debate about dispossession and frontier war, and about precisely what the Constitution should acknowledge. The issue of how history and contemporary culture should deal with the extreme violence at the heart of Australian sovereignty has hardly been settled.
The history wars over? I doubt it.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/latest-view-of-black-and-white-frontier-conflict-sparks-new-history-war/story-e6frg8nf-1226896345898#
