RACHEL PERKINS, STEPHEN GAPPS, MINA MURRAY and HENRY REYNOLDS (Eds) The Australian Wars. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

The Australian Wars presents the confronting facts of white settlement, the massacres of First Nations Australians, and their resistance.

This is a difficult book to read. Its subject matter is the killing of hundreds of thousands of First Nations people by Europeans across the length and breadth of Australia from 1788 to 1930. Europeans wanted the land inhabited by First Nations people, and those who resisted were slaughtered. This was not a case of two armies lining up against each other with one emerging victorious. Rather, over 150 years ‘dirty little battles’ took place as white colonists spread across the country.

These struggles for control of the land are ‘the Australian wars’ of the book’s title. Rachel Perkins, who directed the documentary series of the same name for SBS, writes:

The objective of this book, the first continent-wide survey of these wars, is to help our country come to understand this deeply important aspect of our history.

Reading about 150 years of relentless killings and murder is one thing. The Australian Wars also forces you to think about the nature of Australian society, the delusions white Australians indulge in about our nation and that mystical thing ‘Australian values’. In non-Indigenous narratives of Australian history, the nineteenth century is generally viewed as a period of growth and prosperity. The sad fact is that this growth was based on the slaughter, rape and dispossession of First Nations people.

The Australian Wars is organised chronologically, following the pace of colonisation across Australia over three periods. The first is 1788 to 1830, and examines events in Sydney, eastern New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land/Tasmania. The second, from 1830 to 1860, is concerned with the spread of settlement to north and western New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The discussion of South Australia includes material on the Northern Territory extending into the latter part of the nineteenth century. The third and final period is from 1860 to 1930, which examines developments in northern Australia – Queensland, the Northern Territory, the Kimberley and Torres Strait Islands.

Each of these sections begins with a conceptual introductory overview followed by empirical chapters relating the major events that occurred in each ‘jurisdiction’. The empirical chapters explain the different ways in which the dispossession of First Nations People occurred in the different colonies/states in different periods. This makes for confronting reading. The conceptual introductory chapters are equally if not more distressing as they seek to explain the thinking that enabled the killing.

There are three keys to understanding the ‘practice’ of these wars. The first is First Nations’ resistance. Virtually all of the authors highlight the importance of First Nations agency. There are extensive accounts of how First Nations people organised themselves, the tactics they used, ranging from face-to-face conflict to guerilla warfare, the type of weapons used, famous warriors and the building of alliances with other Nations to take on settlers. In his examination of Queensland, Raymond Evans points out that such resistance was unable to withstand the attacks of white settlers.

[N]o matter how ‘very dynamic and robust’ Aboriginal resistance was in Queensland; how adaptively it transformed its traditional warfare measures as well as its basic weaponry; how crucially it promoted its younger warrior leaders, even chalking up occasional battle victories, in the upshot of these frontier combats it was roundly defeated … They received little or no acclaim for their magnificent fighting prowess, standing bravely with spears, clubs and firebrands against horsemen with repeating rifles and settlers with their guns, dogs and strychnine. Instead, they were vilified as ‘savages’, ‘cannibals’ and, often, as something less than human. By any accounting it is hard to imagine a rout and reduction of humanity more emphatic than this.

The other two keys are numbers and advances in killing technology. When Europeans arrived in Sydney in 1788 they were outnumbered by First Nations people. In 1788 it has been guesstimated that were between 700,000 and one million First Nations inhabitants on the continent. In these early decades, as cohorts of white Europeans sought to settle in new areas, they were usually outnumbered.

First Nations people resisted such settlement, the fouling of waterways and loss of Country, the taking and raping of women and girls, and the killing by settlers and colonial governments. They would take food and animals as ‘rent’ or ‘compensation’ for the destruction of traditional food sources on Country, and drive away or kill those who transgressed First Nations law. Killings, torching of settlements and resistance were generally followed by a strong, disproportionate response by colonial governments, with special police or militia forces and vigilante groups of settlers sent out to teach First Nations people a harsh lesson.

Initially First Nations people held the upper hand in such encounters, with their knowledge of Country and greater mobility. The Europeans learnt that European ways of taking on adversaries would not work in the bush, and found that the best way to extract revenge was through coordinated small-scale massacres. The Australian Wars describes a seemingly never-ending round of massacres of small groups of First Nations people; men, women and children were slaughtered, decapitated, and their bodies burnt to hide evidence.

With the passage of time there were an increasing number of settlements across southern Australia, which resulted in a change in the balance of numbers. Many if not most settlers were too far away from capital cities to get help from colonial governments and took matters into their own hands. Henry Reynolds reports that in the 1840s:

… killing had become both decentralised and privatised … Participants were able to engage in the bloody business with no fear of the law or social opprobrium. A code of silence meant that outsiders would never need to know what happened … You did not have to hold a gun but you certainly had to hold your tongue.

In the second half of the nineteenth century there were important technological changes associated with guns. Single-shot muskets that needed to be reloaded were replaced with repeat firing guns. As settlement spread into northern Australia, small troops of mounted police were assembled to hunt down and kill First Nations people: these troops would just travel around looking for First Nations people to kill. Known as Native Police forces, they comprised Aboriginal people from other areas, headed by a white officer. These forces killed large numbers of First Nations people. It is estimated that in 1859, when Queensland separated from New South Wales and became a colony in its own right, it had a First Nations population of 250,000. By the end of World War I, it had an estimated population of 15,700 – a decline of 94 per cent.

This is the dark heart of Australia. Whatever we are and whoever we Australians have become is based on the original sin of the treatment of First Nations people. Milan Kundera has said, ‘The struggle of [people] against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ The editors and authors of this book are concerned with filling the void of memory; they cannot and will never forget. The Australian Wars begins with the phrase Lest we forget, and its contributors maintain that Australia will never become whole and at peace with itself until we openly acknowledge this stain on our history and learn to walk together down the path of reconciliation.

Yes, this is a difficult book, but it is one that needs to be read.

Rachel Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds (Eds) The Australian Wars Allen & Unwin 2026 PB 416pp $39.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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