#frontier wars

[twitterexile]

[bossybroads]

The 'forgotten people': When death came to the Torres Strait

Milton Savage sits on the porch of his cement board house on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) north of Australia's northern tip.

Historians and Indigenous people are working to piece together Torres Strait Islander history.

'Savage's ancestors, the Kaurareg people, were well-established on the islands of the Torres Strait prior to European settlement but were nearly wiped out in a series of massacres that started in 1869. By the time they were marched off their traditional lands at gunpoint in 1922, only 80 people were left, including Savage's maternal grandparents.'

[meathpress]

Always Will Be Wainellingup

© Martine Perret In an open letter to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Wardandi Sovereign Elder, Vivian Brockman Webb, lays out the case

Open letter to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs from Wardandi Sovereign Elder, Vivian Brockman Webb.

[triumph-of-adaptation]

[youthchronical]

David Marr confronts his family’s history – podcast

While researching his family’s past, journalist and Guardian Australia contributor David Marr discovered his ancestors were officers in the Native Police, an armed force that committed massacres against Indigenous Australians in the 1880s. He speaks to Jane Lee about how the discovery led him to face his family’s ugly past How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know Source link

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[somdyala]

Scorched Earth II, 2022

Karoo Clay, red ochre, red oxide & ash on canvas

92X112CM

[intheshadowofwar]

The Beginning

On the 26th of January 1788, a detachment of British marines landed at Port Jackson, dispatched to the other side of the world to guard what was effectively an open-air prison for Britain’s unwanted convicts. These men had thus undertaken the first landing of British forces in aboriginal land - the first move of the Frontier Wars.

These marines would only be in Australia for about four years, until they were recalled and replaced by the New South Wales Corps. In histories of both colonisation and frontier conflict, they are considered something of a footnote. But they represent the first military force of the state apparatus that would eventually evolve into the Commonwealth of Australia, and therefore a military history of Australia must inevitably start with them.

Many of these marines would settle in Sydney, or transfer to the NSW Corps. They would have children. Those children would in turn have children. And eventually, their descendants would enlist themselves - in the Boer War of 1899, and then the Great War of 1914. The children of the men who fought the First World War - the War to End All Wars - would fight the Second. The memorials to these wars stand in pride of place in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.

It is chauvantistic folly to claim that nations are born of war - to say such disregards the efforts of social and political reformers, workers and labourers, feminists, indigenous rights activists and resistance fighters, the whims of nature and so on. But nations are scarred by war, and those scars run deep. And from those scars, we try to derive some meaning.

What meaning do we take from the conflict between the Eora peoples of the Cumberland Plain and the British marines; or for the battles and massacres that followed? Where are the memorials to the dead? Where is the shrine to them?

Who, at an Anzac Day dawn service or at the minute’s silence on Remembrance Day, thinks of the warrior shot by an armed settler; the redcoat speared at the edge of the colony; the women and children massacred in Van Diemens Land?

Memory is a strange thing. We very much pick and choose who we remember, and who we forget - and we continue on to choose how we remember. What is palatable? What is not?

One would have to get up early in the morning to find out. They’d have to travel, too, for not every place, person or institution remembers in the same way. And inevitably, a hundred people could see the same places and hear the same things, and come up with a hundred different answers.

Come with me, as I try to find out mine.

---

So this is my marine.

You might wonder why I keep showing you pictures of him. Rest assured, I am not some kind of imperialist who thinks you can only lay claim to land if you have a flag. This is a personal memento.

Many years ago, at a Father’s Day event the Imperial War Museum in Duxford (I’m not a father, I just came to see the jeeps), I found this guy at a stall and bought him for one pound. Since then, I have come to collect a pretty large collection of toy soldiers from a variety of periods and countries (and let me tell you, they always seem to be getting incrementally more expensive). Compared to them, this one is a bit old, and the paint is scuffed in some areas, but he’s still got a very special place in my heart because he was the first.

Also, he just so happens to be wearing the same uniform as the British marines who landed at Port Jackson, so he’s actually relevant!

The marine and I (he doesn’t have a name) are going to be taking a little trip this June.

The Australian National University, after having the previous year’s tour called off for -ahem!- unpleasantness, is undertaking a study tour of various memorials, museums and other places of interest across Australia relating to the wars in which it has been involved. I intend to recount this tour on this blog, and I invite you all to read along!

There is more coming this week, so stay tuned.

I hope you enjoy my rambling thoughts!

Oh, and if you’re wondering, that’s Mollymook. I went there for a wedding and brought him to take the pictures. I’m nothing if not prepared.

[dishdasha]

"We need to acknowledge the fact that there was a land war. We also need to acknowledge that Aboriginal people lost it, that they never ceded the land and those facts are important in the national story and in how the nation moves forward.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-28/frontier-war-memorial-in-melbourne-cbd-lies-forgotten/11108480

This, this, this, this, this and this, and all other things that lead you to this.

I’ve been thinking so often lately, that so much of our national problem is sourced from white Australia expecting Blak Australia to be grateful for losing a bloody, genocidal, war.