Selected Readings
Keith Windschuttle
The Australian's Review of Books
April 2001
A reply to an article by Henry Reynolds, March 2001

In 1834 Governor James Stirling of the Swan River Colony led a 25-man expedition to the Murray River, eighty kilometres south of Perth. Their objective was to capture an Aboriginal named Noonar, identified as the murderer of Hugh Nesbitt, a private in the 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers. They also wanted to discover the killers of Private Larkin, speared by Aborigines three months before. On the morning of October 28, near Pinjarra, the expedition came upon a camp of about 80 Aborigines. Stirling sent in a local pastoralist, who knew the tribe, to negotiate the surrender of the wanted men. When he returned empty handed, Stirling ordered in his troops. When Noonar saw he was recognised, he tried to spear a trooper but was shot by one of the officers. Another Aborigine knocked the Superintendent of Police off his horse and speared him, fatally, in the head. A trooper was speared in the arm.

What happened next has long been known as the Battle of Pinjarra. For an hour and a half, Aborigines and troops fought each other with their respective weapons, spears and muskets. In a series of articles in Quadrant last year, I argued this was not a massacre of innocent Aborigines but a genuine battle between two armed, warring parties with casualties on both sides. In response, Henry Reynolds ("From Armband to Blindfold", ARB March) used Pinjarra to claim I was engaged in an ideological "apologia" for the colonists' campaign of "terror" to "crush Aboriginal resistance".

Reynolds quoted a passage from the diary of the colonial official, C. F. Moore, to show how Stirling's expedition trapped the Aborigines between the banks of a river and then picked them off with gunfire as they tried to hide in the water. Here is the full text that Reynolds reproduced in ARB.

Being thus exposed to a crossfire, and having no time to rally their forces, they adopted the alternative of taking to the river, and secreting themselves among the roots and branches and holes on the banks, or by immersing themselves with the face only uncovered. Those who were sufficiently hardy or desperate to expose themselves on the offensive, or to attempt breaking through the assailants, were soon cleared off, and the remainder were gradually picked out of their concealment by the crossfire from both banks, until 25 or 30 were left dead on the field and in the river.

There are a number of points to make about this quotation. First, Reynolds has got the diarist's name wrong. He was G. F. (George Fletcher) Moore. Second, Reynolds gives the impression that Moore was an eyewitness to these events. He neglects to say that he was not in the expedition to Pinjarra. When the battle took place, Moore was on his farm on the Upper Swan River. He wrote the above passage in his diary on November 11. For my description of the battle, I used the writings of the surveyor, Captain J. S. Roe, who was actually there at the time. Whereas the passage quoted from Moore's diary gives the impression the Aborigines were trapped in the local river, unarmed, where they were shot at will, Roe makes it clear the fighting on both sides actually extended into the river itself.

This [the shooting from the banks] was not done without much resistance on the part of the natives, who although crouched in very small and scarcely discernible holes and places, and in many instances had immersed themselves in the water, having only the nose and mouth above water, nevertheless threw numerous spears with amazing precision and force.

What is more, contrary to the impression that Reynolds conveys, Moore himself gave a very similar description of events. For the passage that Reynolds quoted in ARB is actually a doctored version of Moore's diary. A facsimile edition is available in most large libraries where readers can look up page 242 and check for themselves. Reynolds has cut from the passage the crucial clauses italicised below, which convey a quite different impression of the battle. This is what Moore actually wrote:

Being thus exposed to a crossfire, and having no time to rally their forces, they adopted the alternative of secreting themselves amongst the roots and branches and holes on the banks, or by immersing themselves with the face only uncovered, and ready with a spear under water, to take advantage of any one who approached within reach. [emphasis added] Those who etc …

In other words, the Aborigines were not unarmed and, rather than being trapped helpless in the water, they had adopted the river as a defensive position from which to continue the fight.

If Reynolds is prepared to so blatantly alter the historical evidence at a time when his reputation as a historian is being publicly challenged, I leave it to readers to imagine what he has done in earlier works when his scholarship went unquestioned. The worst example I have found is in The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) where he claims 10,000 Aborigines were killed in Queensland. Yet when you check out the 1978 research paper he cites as evidence, it turns out to be not a study of black deaths at all, but of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention 10,000 dead.

In his ARB reply, Reynolds avoids a full account of how this total was actually compiled. Let me tell how he did it. In 1978, despite admitting that "the uncertainty and unevenness of available records made definitive accounting impossible", he took the figure of 800-850 white settlers killed in Queensland -- "merely an approximation", he said at the time -- and multiplied it by ten to produce 8000-8500 Aborigines killed. He added another 20 per cent to bring the total up to 10,000 for The Other Side of the Frontier. Nowhere does Reynolds explain why he chose a ratio of ten to one black deaths to white, (why not two to one, or fifty to one?) or why he then inflated the figure by 20 per cent.

In his ARB defence, he said the white settlers "had an overwhelming determination to avenge any attack on a settler" so, for every white death, he assumes several Aborigines must have been killed. But he offers very little evidence this actually happened. Some memoirs of pastoralists, written in their old age, do recall such reprisals. But even if all bush legends of this kind were true, they still don't provide Reynolds with anything like the empirical foundation needed for the claim that every white death was avenged ten times over. He has to assume that nineteenth century Queensland was crowded with settlers prepared to commit mass murder. Clancy of the Overflow was a serial killer.

It is also unconvincing to quote officials in England who were fed, via the Aborigines Protection Society in London, a steady diet of rumours from colonial missionaries about violence towards Aborigines (often accompanied by applications for jobs and funding to stem the evil). My Quadrant articles showed that responsible people in the colonies, such as NSW Justice William Burton and Premier Stuart Donaldson, demonstrated these missionaries were wilfully unreliable informants.

Reynolds has now made several replies to my critique. Each time, he has mentioned the Queensland Native Police who patrolled the frontier from 1857 to 1896 dispersing gatherings of Aborigines. "Dispersing", he says on the basis of a comment made in a Parliamentary debate in 1861, meant "to shoot at". The native police, he claims, were responsible for numerous killings of Aborigines in Queensland. However, in his book Black Pioneers (2000) he admits there is little information about what the Queensland Native Police actually did. "Our knowledge of the force is inadequate," he wrote. "It appears that most of the records after 1859 have disappeared and were probably deliberately destroyed."

In contrast, the records of the Native Police in Victoria survived largely intact and have allowed Marie Fels to write a substantial book, Good Men and True (1988), about their activities. Fels's assessment, however, is quite different to Reynolds's. She finds they acted as a "deterrent force", both on Aboriginal depredations against white settlers, and on settlers against Aborigines. "They must be credited," she writes, "with the relative absence of conflict in rural Victoria in the 1840s." So in Victoria where we have good records, the Native Police were a force for peace. But in Queensland, where most records have been lost, Reynolds wants us to believe they were a marauding band of killers.

Since 1981, the Henry Reynolds school of Aboriginal history has defined the field. Reynolds and his followers claim that from 1788 until the 1920s, frontier warfare spread across Australia. Guerrilla actions by Aboriginal resistance fighters were countered by punitive expeditions of troopers and vigilantes. Massacres and other killings left 20,000 Aborigines dead. The thesis, inspired more by anti-colonialism in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 60s than Australia two centuries ago, has provided an intellectual framework, or "paradigm", that has determined how research is done and how evidence is interpreted. It has made little critical evaluation of the reliability of evidence. Information from any source is used as long as it fits the dominant thesis, the assumption being that, because it fits the thesis, it must be true. What Reynolds calls "a massive body of scholarship produced by many hands over the last 25 years" is simply the product of people working with the same assumptions, methods and objectives.

As Reynolds observes, this history has become the core around which an "indigenous nationalism" has formed. It has produced a small political class of Aboriginal leaders who have been remarkably successful in demanding their own institutions. Their next objective is a treaty that will give them separate political status. I was very surprised to see Reynolds deny the eventual objectives of a treaty are an Aboriginal state, governed by Aboriginal culture and laws. This is precisely the goal he advocates in his book Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996). He is supported by ATSIC chairman, Geoff Clark, who is also deputy chair of the Aboriginal Provisional Government, a secessionist organisation that has existed since 1990. Anyone who doubts this can look up Reynolds' book or my summary in Quadrant September 2000.

The big problem for this romantic dream is that the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people show little interest in it. Instead of traditional land, 73 per cent of them now live in what the 1996 Census describes as "major urban" or "other urban" areas, principally the outer suburbs of Sydney and Brisbane. In urban areas, their health, education and employment are vastly superior to outback communities. According to a recent analysis by Bob Birrell, 65 per cent of Aboriginal adults who are married or cohabiting, are doing so with a non-indigenous spouse. In the cities and among the young, this figure is as high as 90 per cent. In other words, assimilation, integration or reconciliation -- call it what you will -- is already an accomplished fact in the most intimate way possible. Instead of an Aboriginal state or treaty, instead of customary laws and traditional culture, most Aborigines have shown by their actions they simply want to live like the rest of us. The politics of Aboriginal romanticism, like Reynolds' version of Australian history, have little basis in reality.