Life on the West Island - Written history

Former West Island Prime Minister Tony Abbott has recently published a book which he says will “set the record straight” about our national history, immodestly entitled Australia: A History. He has stated that it is a celebration of a land built by heroes. Naturally, given Abbott’s frequently stated rejection of the well-known history of dispossession and massacre of the First Nations peoples by British colonists, all of Abbott’s historic heroes were white, almost all from Britain and mostly claiming to be bringing Western civilisation to a barren, godless land.

In media interviews promoting his book, Abbott has contended that there is no history of colonists killing Indigenous peoples nor stealing their land, because the only real history is in writing. The inconvenient fact he ignores is that for over seventy years there has been a growing emergence of written firsthand reports of coldblooded killings of First Nations occupants of the Wide Brown Land, including by gun massacres, poisoning of waterholes and blankets infused with smallpox - among others. Many of these written reports have come to light in the digitisation of colonial newspapers and journals through the excellent Trove project of the National Library. These reports by white colonists have been documented in respected, prizewinning books by authors such as historians WEH Stanner and Bill Gammage and senior journalist David Marr, to name just a few.

Abbott has ignored all of these and has campaigned for years against any recognition of the Frontier Wars by the Australian War Memorial (AWM). He is reportedly furious that the AWM has now agreed to create a gallery commemorating the Frontier Wars, due to open to the public in 2027.

Historian and author Stephen Gapps has recently published his third book about the colonial conflicts entitled Uprising – War in the Colony of New South Wales 1838-1844.

In reviewing the book, Peter Lacey of the South Coast History Society outlined its major theme:

The book examines ‘a vast arc of conflict from present-day northern Victoria through to southeast Queensland’ – those so-called ‘Frontier Wars’. Basically, it looks at several significant First Nations victories (at Broken River, near present-day Benalla in Victoria; along the Murrumbidgee River between Narrandera and Wagga Wagga; at Big River, or today the Gwydir River, near Moree; at Meewah, near Toowoomba, Queensland) and then details the colonialists’ counteroffensives. This should be viewed as the ‘scene setting’ for numerous significant, recurring themes, including:

• The ‘Frontier Wars’ were, in reality, a series of conflicts between settlers and Aboriginal peoples, mostly involving guerilla-style attacks.

• These were not a series of isolated incidents (as has often been suggested – probably because the early research into what collectively are now known as the ‘Frontier Wars’ focused entirely on isolated conflicts, each in an entirely different area, by historians looking at only their own local areas).

Instead, they appear to have been part of a well-planned Indigenous campaign to stop European settlers moving into areas outside the ‘limits of location’ (the areas around Sydney and Brisbane, for example, in which settlers could legally take up land and could expect some government protection) or to remove squatters and their stock from areas they had simply ‘acquired’.

Between 1835 and 1838 in NSW there was a frenzied land grab that had been spurred on by high prices for wool, mostly along the fertile major river systems that had traditionally been the home territories of Aboriginal clans. This became the major catalyst for the conflicts. (The government’s response to this land grab was to deem the land to be Crown Land and then to offer it for sale. Stephen Gapps wryly commented that ‘in 1836 the colony’s entire expenditure on the people whose lands they were taking was in the form of blankets at a cost of £904. Income to the colonial coffers that same year from land sales produced more than £130,000.’)

Another reviewer, David Golding of The Saturday Paper, was impressed by the research and conclusions of Stephen Gapps:

A key point of contention in these “frontier wars” is whether the conflict between European and Indigenous people should be regarded by historians, war memorials and the Australian public as wars. Serious academic discussion of this point arose in the early 1980s, and the first book-length “military history of the Australian frontier wars” – written by historian John Connor and helpfully titled Australian Frontier Wars – was published in 2002. More followed, including two by historian Stephen Gapps: The Sydney Wars (2018) and Gudyarra (2021), which carefully examine early conflicts in the Sydney and Bathurst areas respectively.

Gapps’ third book, Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844, continues this work. Uprising features a work by Dhungatti man and Archibald Prize-winner Blak Douglas. It also sets itself apart by covering a far greater range, stretching from Brisbane, through the New South Wales Central West, to Melbourne – significantly, an area that greatly overlaps with the Murray–Darling Basin.

As the titles of his books suggest, it is clear to Gapps that the frontier conflicts were war. He documents support for this position through extensive reference to the rhetorical and logistical evidence of the time. A great many of the sentences in the book contain a quote from primary sources such as contemporary journals, letters and newspaper articles.

I found the author’s interpretation of 1838–1844 as a period of concerted resistance to be convincing. Gapps is gentle and insistent rather than belligerent, though his subject matter is sometimes brutal. As a historian, he’s bringing a new focus and making available new evidence to study. This is a serious book, a seed of future inquiry. Uprising is clear: there’s much to learn about our past.

While Tony Abbott’s new history of the West Island is now on the bookstore shelves, it will not meet his own definition of comprehensive written history until he incorporates the tragic recorded saga of the massacre and dispossession of the First Nations peoples who were here long before the white invaders.