David Marr’s magisterial attempt to atone for his Queensland-based Uhr ancestors – brothers Reg and D’Arcy – who headed up units of the notorious Queensland Native Police in the 19th Century, has a tonne of brilliant research, but somehow failed to evoke the visceral response I felt when reading ‘Truganini – Journey Through the Apocalypse’ by Cassandra Pybus. Coincidentally, both non-Indigenous authors came to their writing because of a sense of shame (not guilt, Marr insists) that they had blood relations involved in such a heinous history.
Pybus actually had family who had heedlessly taken land from the Nuenonne people on Bruny Island, one of whom was Truganini.
Her book wrought this response from me:
“But over and above biography, she’s ripped a veil off a quite conscious and callous genocide of the people of the nine Tasmanian native nations – extirpation was the favoured word at the time in a Tasmania still called Van Dieman’s Land.
“It’s such a powerful a book, I ended up demanding to know just who were these fellow-members of my race, from upright citizens like Governor Arthur and Richard Pybus to the syphilitic bounty-hunter, John Batman, and the surprising number of freelance whalers and sealers operating way outside colonial limits, who would forcibly breed future generations of Tasmanian Aborigines by abducting the tribes’ wives and daughters. And why did these people seem so different from the ‘pioneers’ on the mainland; or were they just the same?”.
Well, David Marr proves conclusively that his pioneer rellies were just the same.
And I blame John Thomas Bigge. For his 1822 Report upended Governor Macquarie’s project to encourage a country peopled by ‘ticket-of-leave’ ex-convicts who’d seize opportunities to better themselves in this new and revolutionary land. Instead, Bigge promoted the migration of a much better class of chaps – often claiming some sort of association with Scottish nobility – who’d ‘pioneer’ the land with their imported funds and become the squatters who’d race northwards through Queensland at the unimaginable rate of 200 miles a year.
Small problem. People such as the Biri, Yangga, Miyun and Yilba clans who didn’t want to share land they’d built both practical and spiritual relationships with over 50,000 years.
Simple solution. Ensure that no one thought of them as people. Much better to say you’re ‘dispersing’ (everyone knew that was a euphemism) “bloodthirsty cannibals” or “a handful of miserable savages”. Then you could obtain international renown for massacring 59 myalls (bush Blacks) as D’Arcy Uhr did in the Gulf Country when steaks were cut out of the flanks of several horses.
“Sub-Inspector Uhr went off immediately in that direction and his success I hear was complete”, gushed the Brisbane Courier, ending “Mr Uhr was accompanied by Mr Hetzer, who has been very kind and indulgent to the myalls for a long time, but now sees his folly. Everyone in the district is delighted by the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the native police. We thank Mr Uhr for his energy in ridding the district of fifty-nine myalls”.
It should be explained that the QNP units consisted of one or two white leaders and a team of mounted and armed Aboriginal ‘policemen’, generally recruited from south of the Murray.
Interestingly the UK press was rather less impressionable, cruelly headlining its report, ‘Exterminating the Natives’. Genocide as a word had not yet been invented, of course. But such headlines did serve to remind contemporary British governments that they had always issued instructions to antipodean Governors that the natives should be assimilated not murdered; indeed all Queensland squatters’ leases insisted that natives should have quiet access to their land. Much hand-washing by Prime Ministers Russell, Gladstone and Disraeli and calls for enquiries – all totally ignored in Australia.
It helped, of course, that most Queensland parliamentarians were themselves squatters, and when young chaps like the Uhr brothers ran out of steam, they got appointments as magistrates.
So, Marr estimates 40,000 Black Queenslanders may have been killed. For it took longer in such remote parts to realise that ‘pacified’ Aborigines actually worked well on the stations. It started in NSW, moved to the Darling Downs and only reached FNQ when questions were asked about the cost of blackbirding Pacific Islanders.
Torrid stuff, and assiduously researched by Marr through contemporary newspapers, reports, letters home, etc. There are 31 pages of references, though, oddly, no annotations as you read.
Another oddity for me is the considerable portion of the book devoted to Richard Jones, vaguely related to the Uhrs, but an important character only in Sydney’s early stuttering development as a political and economic entity. It certainly opened my eyes as to Australia’s precarious start in colonial life, but delayed my arrival in the Killing Country. For it was only when things failed in NSW that Jones expanded into Queensland’s Lockyer Valley, where he left the creation of the QNP to others.
Talking of which, I did enjoy the irony of these thoughts from Henry Parke’s radical organ, The Empire, on a supposedly ‘dying race’ being recruited by the QNP:
“Looking on the twenty-two strapping fellows who have just entered the Queen’s service, all apparently in robust health and capable of much endurance, it is difficult to believe the common doctrine that they belong to a race which is fast wasting away through some mysterious and inevitable decree”.
And that wasting was ‘encouraged’ in the NT and SA as D’Arcy Uhr’s failings saw him move on to pastures new, taking the QNP model with him. He even butchered (meat) in WA, where he died. Like Reg, his obituary surely read, “A white man in every sense”!
By comparison, A Drover’s letter to Melbourne’s Leader newspaper offered the Uhr’s massacre victims an alternative obituary: “So ended the earthly career of these unfortunate blacks, dying, they knew not what for, and dying with the most damning opinion of the white men”.
How timely is this book? After the failed Referendum, I note the current Labor government in Queensland is pressing ahead with the Uluru process: “a First Nations Treaty Institute and a formal Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry to shed light on the State’s particularly brutal history of killing and dispossession”, even as Liberal Oppositions in Queensland and Victoria withdraw their support from Treaty.
David Marr’s Killing for Country is published by Black Inc at c$30
