The Massacre At Murdering Creek - Ray Gibbons

Please enable JavaScript to view the full PDF

Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek In Search of History: the Massacre at Murdering Creek © Ray Gibbons (2015) Abstract: Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process, while the war for land raged across the continent for a century or more. Aboriginals were an impediment to a blitzkrieg of settler occupation. Aboriginal dispersal was abetted by a Government process that included military (at first) and then police enforcement. Heavily armed pastoralists were encouraged to take the law into their own hands, if they did it circumspectly, under the guise of self-protection. Aboriginals resisted, but the war was too one-sided. The reward for resistance was to be shot or hanged. British law did not allow Aboriginals to own land, not until well into the 20th century. Until then, Aboriginal dispossession was legal, leaving the First People as trespassers. With no where else to go they became refugees. Detention centres became the Government answer to the Aboriginal problem. And a ruthless boot on the neck. Over 90% of the Aboriginal population ‘disappeared’ by 1911. We see the pattern of invasive occupation repeat for all states, including Queensland. From the early 1860s, almost all the available pastoral areas in south east Queensland had been taken over by British settlers seeking their fortune. Many leases remained a battleground. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. i Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Document Structure: For We Are Young and Free (FWAYAF) Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek provides a detailed case instance of the Occupation Process and Lemkinian genocide, as defined in the companion methodology (Political Uses of Australian Genocide). The methodology includes a semantic typology for mass killing and the variant terms. It helps us to confirm that the proposed theoretical model for Australian genocide is potentially falsifiable through an elaboration of the abundantly available case instances (or massacre events). This then allows us to develop a theoretically consistent contextual referent (or type instance of the model) for each Recollection in Recollections of a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier 1788 – 1928. Some data stores are reused many times by the central theses. They include biographical details of the central players, and an extended repository of massacres (with those involved, where and when). Rather than replicate the data stores in each thesis, they are made available in a persistent (or reference) data base. Among the data stores is a repository that holds transcripts of the key pieces of land legislation and other Government Proclamations, Enquiries and racist Acts of Parliament that were used to dispossess and subjugate Aboriginals in a sustained genocidal process, as set out in the central theses, and these documents are provided in Documents That Shaped Our Nation. ii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Acknowledgments This paper could not have been written without acknowledging one of the most powerful contributions in the field of Australian race relations. It is the book by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin. They provide a sad commentary on the prejudice that still surrounds any investigation of societal dysfunction and Aboriginal mistreatment: We produced this book ourselves, with little institutional help. Our expressed intentions to pursue the spectre of racism were mostly greeted with academic apathy and unease – at times outright hostility.... When the book at last appeared, some of Brisbane’s leading bookstores refused to stock it and the city’s main daily newspaper neglected to review it. 1 I wish to extend my deep appreciation to Benny Alcorn, Audienne Blyth, Elaine Brown, and Ray Kerkhove, whose research and support made this document possible. Ray and Meredith Walker received a draft, before their presentations to the Australian History Association conference on the subject ‘Conflict in History’ held at Brisbane in July 2014. In particular, I am indebted to Ray Kerkhove, who discovered the hand written letter by William Low to David Bull, dated 1944, at the Royal Historical Society of Queensland archives, illuminating what until now had been an enduring and lengthy conundrum for well over a hundred years. Viz: If the Murdering Creek event in Southeast Queensland actually happened, who might have been involved as perpetrators and involved parties? And when? This will also lead us to examining the reason why, sometimes a more perplexing question, until we remember that motivation for violence at the frontier was not always so mysterious. So enjoy the jigsaw puzzle, as we carefully put the disparate pieces into place, allowing the four dimensional picture slowly to emerge. It is hoped that the case instance model for the murdering Creek event can then contribute to our understanding of the patterned violence that consumed the pastoral frontier for well over a century, part of a series that we will call For We Are Young and Free, where case instances will anchor the primary 2 narrative for each determinable event. 1 Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975): xiv. 2 The back cover shows the mouth of Murdering Creek at its juncture with Lake Weyba in Southeast Queensland. The photograph was taken by the author. Ironically, the council sign is not a plaque to commemorate the historical significance of the site; rather, it is for a fish nursery. iii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale. 3 3 From Bora Ring, by Judith Wright. The physicist and historian, John Steele, in his important book Aboriginal Pathways in South East Queensland and the Richmond River, was shocked and deeply moved to discover the extent of cultural destruction caused by the wholesale extermination and ethnic cleansing, when many surviving Aboriginals wistfully asked him ‘Tell us please where we came from, and who we are. Tell us about our sacred sites, our languages, our customs, and our traditional skills.’ [p. xix] The Aboriginal rights movement, emboldened by the 1992 Mabo decision, is gradually regaining a proud cultural identity for all Aboriginal people. However, there is some way to go: many Aboriginals still live in third world conditions, the result of post-occupation policy and practice for Government at all levels, both State and Federal. And until we acknowledge our murderous past, there remains moral doubt about our future. iv Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Figure 1 Map of the present day Sunshine Coast in southeast Queensland, showing the area between Maroochydore and Maryborough, including the geography north of the Maroochy River where it flows from Yandina, and below Lake Weyba, near Noosaville, the location of Murdering Creek. The sunny Government tourist map overlays the ghosts of the past, buried in an obscured layer of history we are rapidly forgetting in the accretions of time. v Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Preface Myth is the handmaiden of reality, a more onerous citizenship. It can be ignored. Or cast aside as quaint folklore from another time. Or it can be explored and possibly verified or refuted. What cannot be discounted: myth forms a large part of the Australian historical landscape. For over a century, Australia was a war zone. It was a war for land and Aboriginals were in the way. A firestorm of massacres defined the pastoral frontier as it advanced across the continent. Many of these massacres have achieved the element of myth, untested, insufficiently examined, often ignored or discounted, having the elements of social folklore, perhaps fictitious or imaginary, with the imputation of a false belief. Most escape our notice because there were almost never any prosecutions, a genocidal process that saw the Aboriginal population across Australia drop by over 90% from various imposed causes within a hundred and forty years, which is the period between 1788 and 1928, the date of the last major massacre at Coniston in the Northern Territory. Myths allow us to invoke a ‘mysterious process’ for the disappearance of Aboriginal society, invoking prejudicial Darwinian thinking, that Aboriginals were unfit to survive with the arrival of a superior race. Critically flawed of course. Prejudiced, certainly. Racist, absolutely. We remind ourselves that racism is the belief that one race considers itself superior to another. Perhaps history is not so far removed after all. Such analysis as presented here can help identify and acknowledge the facts of past mistakes in a blitzktrieg of similar events to Murdering Creek that brutally overcame any resistance and swept the land clean of Aboriginals for pastoral supremacy. If we accept and admit the past, perhaps in time we can even hope to complete the unfinished business of reconciliation. The massacre at Murdering Creek was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. vi Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost. For many years, I only slowly realized the horrific extent of Aboriginal depopulation after the British invasive occupation. Like most Australians, I was culturally and historically blind, carried along by popular mythology, by the dominant paradigm, by the compelling narrative of heroic settler sovereignty and benign pastoralism in ‘taming the land’. Murdering Creek is one small example of my ignorance. Some political parties and prestigious universities still discourage overly critical examination of our past, believing that it may perpertuate an overtly negative view of Australia’s history. Instead, Governments may ask their constituents to dismiss historical acts of violent racism and some university history faculties ask their students to focus on bland, dispassionate studies such as ‘race relations’ or ‘Aboriginal European’ relations, rather than massacres and the egregious role of Imperial Britain. 4 The absurdist proposition is like a law court admonishing the counsel for an alleged offender: ‘Please do not criticize the crimes of the accused. It is too negative. Please concentrate on the contributions of the accused to the betterment of society’. It is Dadaesqe in its implications. What we are being asked to do is ignore the bloody events of our past, or not bring them to attention, because it is unhelpful to 4 The tendency of certain defined social groups to adhere to dominant paradigms was first noted by Thomas Kuhn in the Sructure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Normative values and patterned modes of thought are an artefact of probability density functions, where the behavioural distribution pattern can be further shaped by directed processes imposed by those with the power to influence the majority. For example, the medical fraternity proponed for a long period that stomach ulcers were caused by ‘stress’, where we now know that the significant cause is a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. Similarly, we now know that gene expression can be influenced by the environment, through the epigenome, which has given rise to the science of neuroepigenetics, suggesting that some normative behavioural disorders can be acquired characteristics, imposed by group selection and environmental stressors. vii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek our multicultural future and our national self-image. The general argument is that we must have a balanced view, consistent with the conceptual relativity of modern social theory. But relative to what? It is like giving equal time to the tobacco lobby, arguing the health benefits of smoking, but ignoring inconvenient evidence. If our past is not acknowledged, how can our future values be qualitatively any better or more considered? Already Australia has the reputation for the greatest number of mammalian extinctions in the world, caused by excessive land clearing, the introduction of feral animals and over-grazing. Already, we are recognised for an Aboriginal depopulation figure of well over 90% since colonisation until the time of Federation. But we are asked to ignore our scotoma, our disability, our dysfunction, assuming that we even recognise the existence of the pathology. We are asked to ignore any unblinkered ways of seeing reality. Until we recognise our past and demand accountability, we must continue with denialism, with perpetuating the ‘standards of the time’ argument, with acceding to the egregious Windschuttle argument that the absence of case law means that genocidal violence did not happen in the longest war in our history. We are asked, as part of the ‘history wars’ and the associated ‘black armband view of history’ derogated by some historians, to ignore those negative aspects of our genocidal past and focus on the heroic endeavours of nation building and the betterment of race relations. We must resist; and we must continue to question. If we do not acknowledge the past, reconciliation is fraught, our national values suspect. viii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Contents Document Structure: For We Are Young and Free (FWAYAF) ............................................................................ ii Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................................. iii Preface ................................................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Terminology ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology......................................................................................................................................................... 23 PART 1: PRELUDE (CONTEXT) ....................................................................................................................... 31 Myth and Reality in Australian Colonial History and Beyond ............................................................................. 31 The ‘Myth’ of Murdering Creek ........................................................................................................................... 56 Contextual Historical Landscape of the Sunshine Coast ...................................................................................... 65 E. G. Heap’s Contextual History of the Maroochy District. ............................................................................ 65 Sunshine Coast Contextual Landscape: 1840 - 1890 ...................................................................................... 81 The Political Uses of ‘Dispersal’ in Early Queensland (Post Separation) .......................................................... 100 Rev. Fuller’s Mission at Lake Weyba and Elsewhere ........................................................................................ 119 Tewantin Residents............................................................................................................................................. 141 Tewantin Parish Settlers – Early 1870s (Based on Post Office Directory Records in 1874) ......................... 144 Australian Census in 1871 (Overall results) .................................................................................................. 146 Results for Wide Bay/ Burnett Area (Gympie to Noosa) ............................................................................... 147 Governor Normanby’s Report ........................................................................................................................ 150 Timber getters ................................................................................................................................................ 154 Lease History of the North Maroochy Runs ....................................................................................................... 157 Leasehold Timelines for Yandina Run and Canando Run ............................................................................. 163 ix Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek PART 2: INTERMEZZO (ANALYSIS) ............................................................................................................ 193 The Strategy, Mechanics and Logistics of Mass Killing .................................................................................... 193 Crime Scene Investigation .................................................................................................................................. 206 Part 1..................................................................................................................................................... 206 Part II .................................................................................................................................................... 211 Part III................................................................................................................................................... 214 Murdering Creek – Fact Based Analysis ............................................................................................................ 216 Deconstructing William Low’s Recollections of Murdering Creek ..................................................... 218 Deconstructing Bull’s and Low’s narrative for the Murdering Creek event......................................... 231 PART 3: FINALE (SYNTHESIS) ...................................................................................................................... 248 Findings .............................................................................................................................................................. 248 Hypothesis One and variation............................................................................................................... 256 Hypothesis Two .................................................................................................................................... 265 Hypothesis Three .................................................................................................................................. 268 Murdering Creek Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 272 Murdering Creek Case Instance............................................................................................................ 273 Murdering Creek Event Flow Diagram ................................................................................................ 281 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................................................... 282 Murdering Creek Analytical Models .................................................................................................................. 282 Type Occupation Process, showing Actionable Components ........................................................................ 283 Occupation Process: Case Instance Example ................................................................................................. 284 Simplified Model of the British Occupation Process ..................................................................................... 286 Murdering Creek as an Instance of the Queensland Genocidal Process......................................................... 287 Process Flow Model (Using Murdering Creek as an example) ...................................................................... 288 Murdering Creek Contextualised Type Process Flow .................................................................................... 290 Murdering Creek Type Process Instantiation ................................................................................................. 291 Profile of Key Actors .......................................................................................................................................... 292 Browne, George (1843 – 1928) ............................................................................................................ 292 Bull, David William (1872 – 1960) ...................................................................................................... 292 Chippindall, William Tatlock (1846 – 1920)........................................................................................ 293 x Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Darwin, Charles (1809 - 1882) ............................................................................................................. 309 Farquarshon, Farquharson, Farcuson, Farquarson? .............................................................................. 310 Goggs, Matthew (1809 - 1885)............................................................................................................. 312 Herbert, Hon. Robert (1831 – 1905) .................................................................................................... 317 Jones, Family ........................................................................................................................................ 319 Low, William Clark (1869 – 1946) ...................................................................................................... 323 Macalister, Arthur, CMG (1818 – 1883) .............................................................................................. 325 MacKenzie, Sir Robert Ramsay (1811 – 1873) .................................................................................... 326 Petrie, Thomas (1831 – 1910) .............................................................................................................. 328 Walker, Frederick (1820 - ?) ................................................................................................................ 328 Wheeler, Frederick (1830 - 1882) ........................................................................................................ 331 Scott, Walter Jervoise (1835–1890) ..................................................................................................... 333 Seymour, David (1831 - 1916) ............................................................................................................. 334 Vickery, Ebenezer (1827 – 1906) ......................................................................................................... 335 Selected Bibliography......................................................................................................................................... 338 Index ................................................................................................................................................................... 345 xi Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek List of illustrations Figure 1 Map of the present day Sunshine Coast in southeast Queensland, ........................................................... v Figure 2 A native of the Kabi tribe, Maryborough, Queensland .......................................................................... 72 Figure 3 Natives of Yabber, Kabi tribe, Mary River, Queensland ....................................................................... 79 Figure 4. Chronology of Aboriginal dispossession along the Sunshine Coast .................................................... 90 Figure 5 King Tommy, King Brown and Susie .................................................................................................... 96 Figure 6 1865 Selection Map (Wide Bay and Burnett) .................................................................................... 106 Figure 7 1865 Selection Map (East and West Moreton, Western and Eastern Downs) ..................................... 106 Figure 8. Crown Lands in Queensland 1860 – 1884 ........................................................................................ 107 Figure 9 Queensland acreage sold by year, between 1860 and 1866 inclusive ................................................. 108 Figure 10 Cumulative Queensland acreage leased from 1860 to 1866 .............................................................. 108 Figure 11. Population Table, Queensland 1860 - 1884...................................................................................... 110 Figure 12 Queensland population growth 1860 - 1866....................................................................................... 110 Figure 13. Queensland land and immigration legislation 1860 - 1866 .............................................................. 113 Figure 14. Members of the Queensland Parliament 1860 - 1864 ...................................................................... 118 Figure 15 Lake Weyba mission, Land records, ................................................................................................. 128 Figure 16 Map of Lake Weyba Aboriginal Reserve ......................................................................................... 130 Figure 17 1886 Survey map from Parish of Weyba .......................................................................................... 138 Figure Figure 18 1874 Tewantin directory names ............................................................................................ 142 Figure 19 1871 census details, Tewantin area ................................................................................................... 143 Figure 20 Post Office name directory (Tewantin area)...................................................................................... 146 Figure 21. 1871 Census details (Tewantin area) ................................................................................................ 150 Figure 22. Portion 1, Parish of Noosa ................................................................................................................ 151 Figure 23. Governor Normanby’s list of Tewantin residents. ............................................................................ 152 Figure 24. Early pastoral leases 1852 - 1868 ..................................................................................................... 157 Figure 25. NSW Crown Lands Report, 1858,.................................................................................................... 158 Figure 26. List of Runs for district of Moreton, ................................................................................................ 159 Figure 27. Treasury Rental Sheet for Yandina Run ........................................................................................... 160 xii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Figure 28. Brisbane to Gympie Road, 1871 ...................................................................................................... 160 Figure 29. Yandina Run lessee history .............................................................................................................. 165 Figure 30. Land records, North Maroochy area ................................................................................................. 165 Figure 31. Land Portions for the Weyba and Maroochy Parishes ..................................................................... 166 Figure 32. Sketch map drawn by William Pettigrew, 1862 ............................................................................... 173 Figure 33. Transfer of Runs, 1864 ..................................................................................................................... 174 Figure 34. Yandian Run advertisement: stock for sale, 1867 ............................................................................ 175 Figure 35. Pettigrew drawing, 1862,.................................................................................................................. 176 Figure 36. Daniel Balmain's application for continuation of Yandina Run lease, 1867 .................................... 177 Figure 37. Disposition of Native Mounted Police, by area and year ................................................................. 195 Figure 38. Brisbane Courier, Monday 1st September 1862, page 2 .................................................................. 201 Figure 39. Show of force at the police barracks, Brisbane, 1868 ..................................................................... 203 Figure 40. The Murdering Creek 'commemorative plaque' ............................................................................... 207 Figure 41. Letter: Low to Bull, page 1. ............................................................................................................. 222 Figure 42. Letter: Low to Bull, page 2 .............................................................................................................. 223 Figure 43. Letter: Low to Bull, page 3 .............................................................................................................. 224 Figure 44. Letter: Low to Bull, page 4 .............................................................................................................. 225 Figure 45. Letter: Low to Bull, page 5 .............................................................................................................. 226 Figure 46. Pettigrew map, 1862 ......................................................................................................................... 229 Figure 47. Comparative fact analysis: Bull v. Low ............................................................................................ 243 Figure 48. Yandina homestead .......................................................................................................................... 245 Figure 49. George Brown's marriage certificate to Sarah Hewett (d. 1932) ...................................................... 245 Figure 50. Letter: Andison to Benfer re. Bull, page 1 ....................................................................................... 247 Figure 51. Letter: Andison to Benfer re. Bull, page 2 ....................................................................................... 247 Figure 53. Actionable component architecture .................................................................................................. 273 Figure 54. Actionable component type architecture .......................................................................................... 274 Figure 55. Actionable component type instance architecture ............................................................................ 274 Figure 56. Process Flow decomposition for Australian Lemkinian genocide ................................................... 275 Figure 135. Simplified model of the Australian occupation process, ................................................................ 286 xiii Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Figure 127. Murdering Creek massacre process flow diagram.......................................................................... 288 Figure 136. William Chippindall biographical summary .................................................................................. 294 Figure 137. Chippindall family record .............................................................................................................. 296 Figure 138. Chippindall family record .............................................................................................................. 297 Figure 139. William Chippindall selected genealogy ........................................................................................ 298 Figure 140. Albert Chippindall New South Wales BDM Registry record for birth ........................................... 299 Figure 141. Herbert Chippindall birth record .................................................................................................... 299 Figure 142. Francis Chippindall marriage certificate, ....................................................................................... 300 Figure 143. William Chippindall Mary Valley leases, up to 1880 .................................................................... 303 Figure 144. Willkam Chippindal Mary Valley leases, up to 1880..................................................................... 304 Figure 145. William Chippindall Mary Valley leases, up to 1880 .................................................................... 305 Figure 146. John Farquharson police service record ......................................................................................... 311 Figure 147. Matthew Goggs selected chronology ............................................................................................. 317 Figure 148. The Nambour Chronicle, Friday 3 May, 1946, page 4. .................................................................. 325 xiv Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek INTRODUCTION Terminology I prefer the adjectival noun ‘Ab’original’ to the proper name ‘Ab’origine’, which has accumulated inexcusable and derogatory connotations as a result of British Imperial contact history, associated with being ‘subhuman’ and ‘vermin’ and ‘dogs’ and ‘snakes’. Even gentle Darwin subscribed to this racist view of Aboriginal inferiority, 5 as we see from his writings while he was travelling with the Beagle and recording his observations in the 1830s, gathering evidence for his nascent theory of Natural Selection. This document will use the term ‘Aboriginal’, and ‘Aboriginals’ will collectively refer to the Aboriginal peoples or nations or societies across Australia. The Macquarie International English Dictionary (complete and unabridged edition) defines Aboriginal as (noun) a descendant of any of the indigenous peoples who inhabited Australia before the arrival of European settlers. I would agree except for the qualification of European. More correctly, it should read British. To say otherwise is to obfuscate. Massacre The editor’s use and definition of the term ‘massacre’ requires some explication in the Aboriginal context for colonial pastoral society: 6 The Macquarie Dictionary defines massacre as ‘the killing of large numbers of people or animals’, that is, a mass killing. But it is more. When we examine the etymology of the word ‘massacre’ we find it derives from maḉacre (French), which is adapted from maslakh (Arabic), meaning: ‘slaughterhouse’ (Old Norse slatr ‘to slay’) or ‘abattoir’ (French abatre ‘to fell’). An Aboriginal massacre, as used here, is: the indiscriminate and/ or deliberate murder (whether ‘lawful’ or unlawful retribution or simply homicide) of two or more Aboriginals (whether or not they were able to adequately defend themselves) in a single incident or 5 They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, pp 431 – 436. 6 There is a semantic lexicon and referential typology for the term: slaughter. It includes the overlapping meanings for massacre, genocide and ethnic cleansing. See Gibbons, Ray, For We Are Young and Free Political Uses of Australian Genocide, [FWAYAF, 2014]. 1 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek the indiscriminate and/ or deliberate murder of one or more Aboriginals (whether ‘lawful’ or unlawful retribution or simply homicide) in separate but linked incidents. For example, soldiers, police or squatters traveling around any area such as the Bathurst or New England regions in New South Wales, or the Upper Dawson or Warrego/ Maranoa in Queensland or Coniston in the Northern Territory, or Tasmania or the Kimberley in Western Australia or any other. This can be over a period of days or weeks as part of a planned and coordinated party, with the intention to exterminate some or any Aboriginal encountered (man, woman or child), using means both direct (stabbing, shooting, poisoning, clubbing, drowning, forced or coerced suicide – for example by forcing Aboriginals over a cliff) \ and indirect (starving, infecting, chaining up, incarceration, torture, sexual predation, segregation, forced removal of children, withholding reasonable standards of nutrition, housing and health care, abuse of human rights) leading to avoidable death. These methods of patterned extermination fall into the categories of Aboriginal genocide and ethnic cleansing, for which massacres are the structural bricks and mortar. Government land policy was the purposeful and greatest instrument of ethnic cleansing. The consequence of British land policy was Aboriginal extermination and displacement on a significant scale, described by one historian as a ‘melancholy footnote to Australian history’, something we are embarrassed to acknowledge, and generally prefer to politely ignore with ‘the great Australian silence’. 7 Can a determination of ethnic cleansing be a retrospective judgment on official British policy, that is, before the act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ had a name? Yes, when the historical record clearly shows that successive governments in Britain (and later in Australia) knew they had conducted a terrible wrong against an ethnic group, the original inhabitants, but justified the wrong as being in the national economic interest, which for a considerable time was the pastoral interest. Governments were aware of wrongdoing, but were implacably determined to continue with the same policies until the problem ‘disappeared’. Governments were determined to exterminate as many Aboriginals as possible, driven by an economic imperative for settler sovereignty. 7 W.E. Stanner, The Boyer Lectures 1968 After the Dreaming 2 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Governments, the military, police (and certainly squatters) deliberately kept few or no records of direct killing operations or the body count. From 1788 to 1928, there were a negligible number of charges or convictions for murdering Aboriginals, which might provide documented legal case histories. Therefore – apart from declarations of martial law - we rely on other evidence, such as police deployment and service records, first-hand anecdotal accounts (both British and Aboriginal), letters between colonial authorities, letters from squatters to their families and others, letters to newspapers, personal journals, blanket distribution counts, and so on, the liminal hints and whispers of violent conquest. If mass killing was beyond abhorrence, the repression and subjugation phases of British occupation were arguably far worse, where the white oppressors often used opium and alcohol as a form of payment for Aboriginal labour or sexual favours, and malnutrition, detention and disease became endemic, creating an even more fearful mortality. Diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea also did their loathsome work, often on young children, and often deliberately infected by whites, some of whom believed it was a cure for their venereal infection in much the same way that some African males believe they can cure AIDS by sleeping with a virgin. Sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis were unknown among Aboriginals before the British occupation. It was rare for Aboriginals to receive any reasonable medical treatment after. 8 Starvation and chronic ill health became common, along with other preventable diseases; and pervasive, lingering, trans-generational despair, where hope is too often at the end of a bottle or the point of a needle. In the last decade, there has been a certain amount of intensive and ongoing discussion, between some historians, on what constitutes a massacre. For example, Windschuttle 9 claims there were no Aboriginal massacres whatsoever, only legitimate and justifiable homicides against Australian citizens, Aboriginals, who broke the law and were resisting lawful apprehension and punishment, in which category he would include fleeing women and 8 The appalling story of widespread and mostly untreated venereal disease among North Queensland Aboriginals is very well told by Noel Loos in his seminal 1976 PhD thesis: In 1901, the Sydney Bulletin reported that Roth had estimated that 6,000 of the 16,000 Aborigines he was responsible for were then suffering venereal disease. [Part III, Aboriginal – European Relations in the Pacified Areas, p. 14 (71 pages), or p. 466 of entire thesis. Part III focuses on the heavy suffering caused by introduced disease, poor nutrition and economic exploitation.] Noel informs us that the quote refers to The Bulletin, 10 August 1901, Bertie Newspaper Clippings, 68 (N.L.), where the Bulletin wrote: ‘6,000 are suffering from virulent contagious disease obtained originally by contact with the noble white man.’ Noel notes that ‘The use of the singular ‘disease’, the tone of moral disapproval, and the refusal to be specific strongly suggest that ‘venereal disease’ is implied.’ Loos, Noel (1976), Aboriginal – European Relations in North Queensland, 1861 – 1897, PhD thesis, James Cook University http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/10414 9 Keith Windschuttle (2000), Myths of frontier massacres, Quadrant Online, October 2000, quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2000/10/myths-of-frontier-massacres/ 3 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek children. He also argues that without criminal prosecutions, there is no case law, and therefore no legally acceptable evidence of wide spread wrongdoing against Aboriginals. Bill Thorpe 10 proffers that if one side is armed with guns, and the other with spears, it cannot be a ‘battle’, which implies ‘a more or less equivalent struggle between contending forces’. He further suggests that any action in which one side’s casualties are much higher than the other cannot be a ‘battle’. However, Connor (a military historian) reminds us that when British soldiers, mostly armed with Martini-Henry rifles, killed many Zulu warriors armed with no more than stabbing spears during the Zulu War of 1879, few disagree that it was a ‘battle’, 11 although horribly one-sided. In a ‘battle’, so the argument goes, protagonists do not have to be evenly matched; a ’battle’ presumes the rules of ‘war’. 12 Generals deliberately attempt to make conflicts as one-sided as possible. Thorpe extends his thesis in an article with Raymond Evans, where they note that a ‘battle’ can quickly turn into a ‘rout’ then a ‘massacre’, 13 irrespective of how we may define these stages. Their distinction helps us identify the difference between an event and a process, especially when an event can comprise a process, and a process may comprise many events. The rapidly evolving process dynamic of a ‘battle’ is typical of confrontations between firearms and pieces of wood. Richard Broome 14 defines a massacre as the ‘mass killing of defenceless people.’ By this definition, killing unarmed civilians or disarmed prisoners of war is a ‘massacre’. Myall Creek then was a ‘massacre’, one of many. This definition assumes the massacre happened in a single event, which was rarely the case in Australia. ‘Massacres’ often took place over days or weeks as tribes were hunted down across their territory, and often had no witnesses, just the mute evidence of missing Aboriginals. The definition also lacks precision on what ‘mass killing’ or ‘defenceless’ might mean. Is a woman ‘defenceless’ when she raises a waddy against a revolver? Jacques Semelin, who has carried out extensive studies into understanding the causes and effects of ‘genocide’, defines ‘massacre’ in sociological terms as a form of action that is most often collective and aimed at destroying non-combatants. 15 Is an Aboriginal, with a 10 Bill Thorpe (1995), Frontiers of Discourse; Assessing Revisionist Australian Colonial Contact Historiography, Journal of Australian Studies, 46: 34 – 45. 11 Connor, John (2005), The Australian Frontier Wars 1788 – 1838: 82 12 By ‘war’ we shall mean ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, and is now the generally accepted and classic definition, as given by the Prussian General and military thinker Karl von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831), which seems more apt than the terser Macquarie Dictionary’s ‘armed fighting’. In the Clausewitz definition, the will of the British was that Aboriginals should cede all rights to their land without resistance or objection, and if they resisted they were forced by the use of weapons to comply. 13 Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe (2001), Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History, overland.63.2001, ehttp://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/101.pdf last accessed 2 July 2014. 14 Richard Broome (1982), Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance, Allen & Unwin. 15 Jacques Semelin (2013), Purify and Destroy The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, p. 4 4 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek hunting spear at hand - who is trying to protect his family while armed men on horseback surround his camp at dawn - a ‘combatant’? Alternatively, can an aggressor lawfully shoot a victim because he ‘feared for his safety’? Is a child a ’combatant’, because he or she is attempting to escape on foot before a pursuing mounted police officer, or can the child be ’lawfully’ shot because they were ‘evading arrest’. If so, the Semelin definition implies, like Connor’s, that notional ‘combatants’ cannot be ‘massacred’. The terminological imprecision suggests we need a typology, which separates the conceptual overlap between ‘war’, ’battle’, ‘criminality’, ‘massacre’, ‘genocide’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, and ‘homicide’, both lawful and unlawful. It was more confused at the pastoral frontier, or simply more brutal, where killing did not need any justification. Police and pastoralists generally carried out the undeclared ‘war’ against Aboriginals, and the ‘law of the bush’ prevailed. Witnesses were few. Connor argues 16 from a militaristic perspective that, while the British killed ‘non- combatants’ at Pinjarra, it was not a ‘massacre’ but part of a ‘battle’. I disagree. When unarmed people are indiscriminately shot while bobbing up and down in a river, it is a ‘massacre’, although it may have started as a one-sided ‘battle’. The general consensus, summarized by Barker, 17 seems to be that a ‘massacre’ is the one-sided indiscriminate killing of a group of people (two or more) in a single short event or the one sided indiscriminate killing of one or more people in a systemic and ongoing process of killings around some extended event. I have extended this definition to include homicide in its various legal forms. Today Aboriginal massacres would be unthinkable to most Australians, but pervasive Aboriginal disadvantage continues, with many resulting deaths. There is a cynical form of pervasive Government mistreatment and neglect. It leads to high levels of punitive incarceration, systemic poverty, malnourishment, excessive policing, and alienation for many Aboriginals, particularly those living in remote camps and reserves with generally poor housing, sanitation, food and water supplies. In Australia, being black amounts to a crime, with gaol, prevailing disadvantage and preventable disease the punishment. That is, there is an officially sanctioned policy across all levels of Government of massacre by another name: the toleration of early and avoidable Aboriginal deaths. This has been the case for the last one hundred years, and followed behind the process of colonization and closer settlement. 16 Connor (2005), Op. Cit.: 81 – 83. 17 Bryce Barker (2007), Massacre, Frontier Conflict and Australian Archaeology, Number 64, June 2007, Australian Archaeology, www.library.uq.edu.au/ojs/index.php/aa/article/viewFile/393/423 last accessed 2 July 2014. 5 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek There is increasing evidence that the many Aboriginal problems of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, youth suicide, domestic violence, malnourishment, trachoma, diabetes, kidney disease and so on, may be symptoms of an epidemiological problem. It could be characterized as a collective, persistent and heritable post traumatic stress disorder, where Aboriginals as a marginalized group continuously and helplessly relive the ‘killing times’, the ‘stolen generations’, and violent dispossession, effecting a sense of numbness, apathy and hopelessness. Aboriginals, like the unfortunate transportees of yesterday, remain excessively condemned by social disadvantage into abject poverty, ill health and punitive incarceration. Unlike the transportees, for Aboriginals there is as yet no hopeful sign of a ‘ticket of leave’, particularly for those living in remote communities. They want to get on with their life, and quietly manage their hurt, but continuing racism holds them back in relative social disadvantage. To our nation’s shame, the proud descendants of Australia’s First people persist in unconscionably large numbers as victims of repressive Government policies that perpetuate the cycle of disengagement and despair. Genocide 18 In Australia, we equivocate over the use of the word ‘genocide’. The overall argument, supported (it must be said) by many historians, is that ‘genocide’ is something that happens elsewhere. There is an element of denialism involved in rejecting the facts of history. But genocide did happen here, within the UN meaning as we shall see. Yet we collectively continue to ignore it, as though the act of ignoring or denying will somehow make any uncomfortable facts go away, or allow them to be replaced with a more comfortable interpretation. Our moral dilemma is that genocidal behaviour exposes our values as a society, and potentially makes us think less of ourselves. The temptation is to put aside or reject the past, especially anything unpalatable that may reflect negatively on our self-image as a nation. We will convince ourselves that genocide can only happen in the future, and somewhere else, and that the past is immune from criticism, because it occurred before the UN Convention was agreed, a form of reframing. The semantic difficulty is that different people understand different things when they use the term, but many fail to remember that the word ‘genocide’, which has a precise and internationally recognised legal definition that only came to be resolved in the 1940s, when Lemkin was trying to articulate certain classes of mass murder and destruction, in order to have them made a criminal offence under a proposed United Nations Convention. 18 A more comprehensive investigation of Australian genocide is set out in FWAYAF, Political Uses of Australian Genocide, 2014 6 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek The Convention on the crime of genocide includes, but is not limited to, targeted mass killing. It recognises there are many ways for human lives to be taken away, and not just by the physically violent act of massacre. Dispossession is equally effective, and more so when accompanied by heavily armed policing and overtly racist legislation. All methods are part of the genocidal process. Why is the term ‘genocide’ limited in the public mind to the mass killing of a targeted population? The misconception no doubt derives from Nazi death camps, where Jews were horribly exterminated on an industrial scale. But that is not what ‘genocide’ actually means, under the UN Convention. Many historians perpetuate the misconception, among them, Alison Palmer in a very well researched book on Queensland Aboriginal massacres. She writes ‘Genocide refers to the intention to destroy a whole or substantial part of a group physically, because they are members of that group.’ 19 The definition is incorrect, as we will see in a few pages. Alison then goes on to examine what happened to Queensland Aboriginals, within the narrow terms of her definition, and concludes: ‘The structure and resources of the Queensland government were so limited during this period that any plan to systematically annihilate the Aborigines would have failed.’ Having rejected that ‘genocide’ occurred, as she has defined it, she then reminds us how the Queensland Government imposed conditions of life intended to bring about the physical and cultural destruction of Aboriginals. But this is exactly what the Convention defines as genocide in Article 2 (c): Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Alison writes: ‘Despite efforts of the government to absolve itself of any responsibility towards Aborigines at the frontiers, its intentions are revealed – the subjugation of Aborigines through violence and death. This was accelerated by starvation which forced 19 Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide, p. 1 7 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Aborigines into the territory of other groups and incurred intertribal violence, the spread of venereal disease which prevented reproduction, and of other diseases such as measles, and the demoralisation and denigration of the survivors.’ 20 Even this summary understates what happened to Aboriginals at the hands of police and pastoralists. Alison does not say the venereal disease was introduced through infected whites, who predated on Aboriginal women. She does not mention the ‘stolen children’ in the Bringing Them Home report (discussed earlier) that asserted Removal of children with this objective in mind [absorption or assimilation into the wider, non-indigenous community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear] is genocidal because it aims to destroy the cultural unity which the Convention [Genocide Convention 1948] is concerned to preserve. Alison does not mention Government eugenic efforts to ‘breed out the colour’. In Queensland, these Government genocidal programmes were called by the Aboriginals ‘living under the Act’. 21 The Act was introduced in variant forms across the other states as an effective Aboriginal ethnicity eradication programme. Finally, Alison does not mention the key enabler for Article 2 genocide, the deliberate, planned and intentional alienation (theft) of Aboriginal land, begun by the British Government from 1792, but arguably beginning with the first settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788, leaving Aboriginals increasingly without a home, as they were removed at gun point by pastoralists and settlers, many of whom had their emigration from Britain subsidised. In a recent work, 22 the expatriate Australian and British based lawyer, Geoffrey Robinson argues, I think wrongly, that genocide is a matter for judges, not historians. In fact, genocide as defined by Lemkin is a matter for ethicists, for how we should live, for those who passionately believe in human rights, a journey that would demand we unravel the circumstances of Australian genocide and logically lead us to an Australian Bill of Rights, not just human, which we are as far from as ever. It would certainly require us to introduce domestic legislation to make genocide a crime, for which the proposed Commonwealth Act lapsed in 2008. While Robinson focuses on Turkey, he is curiously silent on Australia, a place we might assume was closer to his roots. The New South Wales parliament recognised Armenian 20 Ibid, p. 58. 21 1897 Opium Act, see FWAYAF Documents That Shaped Our Nation for a transcript. 22 Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Remembers the Armenians? 8 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek genocide in 2013, but the Abbott Government refuses to do so, because it might upset the Turks and lead to their restrictions on Australian travel to Gallipoli, a holy site for one of our enduring myths. Unless we confront our own murderous past, Armenian genocide becomes academic. Perhaps Robinson believes, like so many lawyers, that genocide is limited to the large scale mass killing of a targetted group, usually ethnic, with the intent to remove them entirely from a certain geographic area. This is to miss the point of Lemkin’s definition, which clearly understands that a people can be destroyed in many ways: by destroying their culture or prohibiting cultural activities; by causing the group mental harm; by imposing measures to prevent births within the group (in the early 20th century, most Australian Governments had a eugenics policy that was intended to breed out the aboriginal traits); by forcibly depopulating their homelands; or through imposed starvation and disease; or by stealing their children and their land; or by disrupting social cohesion; or by relocating them to detention centres where the inhospitable conditions reduce their urge to live; or by using oppressive policing; or by systematically taking away hope; and finally, by mass killing as the pastoral frontier rolled across the continent. This is what Lemkin meant, when he obtained the resolution of the United Nations in 1948 that genocide means acts committed with an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, for which the Genocide Convention would introduce criminal penalties to punish those who perpetrated such genocidal acts. When does ‘massacre’ become ‘genocide’? In summary, ‘genocide’ is sometimes (incorrectly) defined as the intentional, sponsored and systematic killing of a group of people based on race, culture or religion with the objective to remove that group of people from an entire area. 23 If we accept this definition for the moment, then this was the case in Australia, although Government intentionality and sponsorship is often - I think wrongly - disputed. Circumspection about motives is sometimes wise, but not if it leads to equivocation and discourages critical examination. For example, Jonathon Richards, a highly respected historian, provides the following dialectic: Did genocide take place in Colonial Queensland? Genocide is perpetrated not only by states but also groups of individuals. In recent years it has been argued that genocidal extermination took place in Queensland, but there is debate over the term genocide and its applicability to situations where Indigenous people were murdered 23 There is, yet, no agreed semantic typology for ‘mass killing’ in all its variants, including genocide, war, ethnic cleansing and massacre. Gibbons, For We Are Young and Free, attempts to address this question. 9 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek and their manner of living assaulted by colonisers. The difficulty with using genocide in a technically correct way arises because there must, according to the commonly understood definition, be clear evidence of government intention. Aboriginal people in Queensland and other Australian colonies were killed for their land, but there were no official orders for this action.24 Parliamentary debates following critical newspaper articles are illuminating, showing that senior politicians knew the colonial government was complicit in racial violence. The Queensland government was like a parent who covers up their offspring’s regular murderous sprees, culpable according to the law of the time. All murder was illegal. There are references in the primary sources to activities with genocidal outcomes in other places. Some settlers in Queensland remarked upon violence in other Australian colonies. Even the Executive Council noted this, reporting ‘blacks were shot down’ in Tasmania, and ‘almost exterminated in the settled districts of New South Wales and Victoria – often by wholesale massacres’. Pioneer North Queensland grazier Edward Palmer agreed, writing in the Queenslander of 25 July 1874 that the history of North Queensland in connection with the Blacks was similar to that of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria and ‘perhaps if the truth were spoken the means of getting rid of them are similar too.’ The use of the term genocide is clouded by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide of 1948, which specifies that intent is a prerequisite. It is, at this point in time, quite difficult for many citizens of former settler-colonies to recognise that their societies are built on the violent theft of Indigenous land and other resources. Until that historical injustice is acknowledged, colonial formations such as the Native Police, and the important part they played in the colonisation process, will continue to be misunderstood. Quite simply, without the use of armed force and the cooperation of Indigenous people, colonisation would not have succeeded in many parts of the world. The true history of the Native Police cannot be separated from an admission of the violence that underwrote Queensland’s occupation by European squatters and miners. The Native Police was not the only dirty tool; a number of squatters also organised their own murdering parties. According to genocide scholar Colin Tatz, ‘almost all historians of the Aboriginal experience avoid the word ‘genocide’, and he argues that this reluctance demonstrates ‘the place of morality in Australian politics’. In cases such as this, suppressed historical guilt may have superseded all other ethical issues. Not all agree with his assessment: different historians arrive at a range of conclusions. Dirk Moses, 24 My italics. In fact, Richards’ assertion can be contested, as we will see. 10 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek using the work of Alison Palmer and Henry Reynolds, says the Native Police was a form of government-sponsored genocide. Evidence cannot be found to conclusively prove that the Queensland government was directing or even condoning the killings performed by the Native Police. What this really means is that we need some other terminology to express dramatically and honestly what some agents of colonisation and their hirelings did to Aboriginal people. And we need language to describe a government that did not go on the record as intending to exterminate Aboriginal people, but certainly was relieved when the men of the Native Police escaped murder charges. Genocidal acts were committed when opportunities arose. Like a suspect who cannot be brought to trial for want of evidence, the government escapes a decisive historical verdict. Morally, though, it is clear that successive Queensland governments conducted themselves with a repugnant disregard for the lives of Aboriginal people. Historically, the momentum for extermination came mostly from the periphery. There were people at the centre (i.e. Brisbane) who agreed, but the historical evidence shows that there were far more people in the metropolis who didn’t support the killing. The frontier is a different (but not unconnected) realm. In the Queensland context, genocide is an inadequate word, and the United Nations declaration too narrow to allow the term to stick. Raymond Evans’ approach is more appropriate and accurate: Private individuals illegally accomplished more genocidal outcomes than did the state via its military, police and native police forces, but the state was complicit, via its failure to prosecute Europeans for the killing, kidnapping or injuring of Aborigines.25 `It is true that ‘genocide’ is a recently confected term that, perhaps unsurprisingly, absolves all members of the United Nations Security Council from retroactive prosecution. But, contrary to Richards’ assertion, there is evidence from documented records 26 that the Queensland Government had a deliberate policy of ‘dispersal’ which was stated to include the meaning of mass killing. What is not in question is that military personnel, pastoralists 25 Jonathon Richards, The Secret War A true history of Queensland’s Native Police: 206, 207. Although Richards quotes Evans’ contention that most of the Aboriginal killing was carried out by settlers, Evans may now have changed his thinking, after a recent collaboration with Orsted-Jensen.[See Appendix: A partial case for Queensland genocide]. 26 See for example the 1861 Queensland Government enquiry into making police methods more ‘efficient’, where ‘dispersal’ was made official Government policy, ruthlessly enforced by Police Commissioner Seymour from 1864 until 1895. 11 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek and police conducted ‘mass killings’ of Aboriginals in a politically driven programme of ‘dispersal’ operations to remove Aboriginals from large parts of the country where they might interfere with pastoral and other commercial activities. First, there were the violent homicides and indiscriminate mass killings. Then there were the quiet deaths, the unseen deaths, the deaths from starvation and disease, the despairing deaths that followed dispossession and loss of hope. Over a period of one hundred and fifty years, only a handful of individuals were ever convicted for Aboriginal murder across Australia. Criminalising the dispersal policy would have made the Government culpable, along with the police. But ‘dispersal’ was official Government policy, as we shall see. And British settlers were enthusiastic collaborators in the process. Events like Murdering Creek were the characteristic and coldly intentional result. The Government policy of ‘dispersal’ involved, at different times, killing, removal of children from their families, 27 and removal of adults to detention centres. The ‘dispersal’ process conforms to its modern incarnation, ‘ethnic cleansing’, 28 through means that crossed over into ‘genocide’. Dispersal was also official, written and sanctioned Government policy, that it, it was intentional. In this protracted land war, 29 where the firearm and horse were decisive tools, land legislation, police operational procedures and a racist criminal code proved the most potent weapons of all. So did ‘genocide’ happen in Australia? First we must address the misconceptions. To reprise: Genocide 30 is often thought of as a calculated game of numbers, relative numbers, reducing 27 People such as Andrew Bolt deny that any Aboriginal children were stolen through harsh and discriminatory Government policies. Bolt claims, without evidence, that the period of ‘stolen children’ was a humanitarian Government policy to help assimilate certain Aboriginal children into white society. One of the most thorough rebuttals of this Bolt denialist position is expressed by Robert Manne, where he exhaustively identifies state-by- state the thousands of children of mixed descent who were forcibly removed from their mothers. Robert Manne (2006), The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, 172 pages, download from http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2006/september/1244160772/robert-manne/stolen-generations 28 Op. Cit., Connor. After 1838, the British military transferred the prosecution of the war to the fledgling colonies as a cost saving measure, and the killing of Aboriginals accelerated. The political and economic uses of mass killing, dispersal and legislatively imposed Aboriginal subjugation remained shared (to varying degrees) between the Australian self-governing colonies and Britain until Federation in 1901. 29 The land war is the longest war in our history, lasting from 1788 until roughly 1928, the date of one of the last massacres, although the war is unrecognised by the Australian War Museum in Canberra. 30 The case for Australian genocide was noted by Justice Wilcox in Nulyarimma v. Thomson in his summary judgment, but that it was conditional on ‘intent’. Wilcox is also quoted by Henry Reynolds in An Indelible Stain, p. 32. Ethnic cleansing is a variation of genocide. Ethnic cleansing also requires the physical removal of the unwanted group from an area or areas, but not necessarily with their deliberate mass extermination in concentration camps or through other instruments of wholesale killing, say the use of lethal gas or phosphorous bombs on a target population group. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are still not crimes under Australian law, although crimes against humanity have now been criminalised. A Bill of Rights would help resolve these omissions and contradictions, where Australian law is out of step with international law, but lacks political support. Gen-o-cide:1: the use of deliberate systematic measures (as killing, bodily or mental injury, unlivable conditions, prevention of births) calculated to bring about the extermination of a racial, political, or cultural 12 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek the numbers of a targeted group within a designated area to zero if possible and through various categorizable behaviours within some loose interpretation of the UN definition of genocide, including mass killing, cultural destruction and eugenics. It is plausible, but is it correct? ‘Genocide’ is a legal term within an agreed United Nations Convention, and has a precise definition. Yet there is still great misunderstanding over the meaning of the word genocide. For example, some aver that the Convention fails to mention whether a ‘state’ can be culpable, if in fact it needs to. Some also argue that the Convention allows for the possibility of state complicity in the use of the term ‘sponsored; but although the verb ‘sponsored’ appears in some definitions, it is not mentioned in the only important legal definition, which is the UN Convention. However, the efforts of the nation states in word-smithing the agreed definition of ‘genocide’ allow the criticism that the UN Convention is badly compromised, because it excludes (or fails to mention) genocide specifically carried out by a nation state and fails to reflect general community understanding of accountability. 31 There is an argument that the UN Security Council members wished to avoid being prosecuted themselves, as many member states had already committed genocide, or could reasonably be accused of such, and might do so again or want to have that option in pursuing their perceived national interests. Certainly, the apparatus of the UN Security Council allows the right of veto. Finally, there is a misconception that retroactive prosecution is not possible, because the convention does not allow it. To correct the misunderstanding, we must refer to what the UN Genocide Convention actually says. The word genocide 32 was created by Rafael Lemkin in the 1940s, following WWII, to categorise and criminalise certain types of mass murder and ethnic destruction, and give them world-wide focus. That is not to say that there was no equivalent behaviour to what group or to destroy the language, religion, or culture of a group; 2: one who advocates or practices genocide. [Webster] 31 In Research Online, D. Manderson of Macquarie University reminds us of the 1992 Mabo decision, where, in the 1992 Mabo decision, Justices Deane and Gaudron describe Aboriginal mistreatment: An early flash point with one clan of Aborigines illustrates the first stages of the conflagration of oppression and conflict which was, over the following century, to spread across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the Aboriginal peoples and leave a national legacy of unutterable shame. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=ltc We must all share the inter-generational collective guilt. We must all be able to say ‘Sorry’. [See Mabo v. Queensland (No.2) (1992) 175 CLR 1 F.C. 92/014] http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/high_ct/175clr1.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query=~mabo 32 Genocide: Gk ‘genos’ race, ‘cide’ killing. But the Convention is much broader in its definition than this, which is perhaps why there is some public confusion, where there is a tendency to associate genocide with Nazi death camps, where millions of Jews (and others) were exterminated. 13 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek we now call ‘genocide’ before the UN Convention was realised. There are far too many examples in the last two hundred years, including - we will argue - what happened in Australia and is still happening today. So how did we get to the formal UN concept of genocide? What are the facts and how do we separate the facts from misconceptions? The pattern of genocide - or its broader variant, ethnic cleansing - was recognized in the early 19th century, and probably much before, whenever one group of people sought to exert their authority over another; but it was not until the United Nations was established that a Convention was formalized, through the exertions of Lemkin, 33 to set out the expected and normative behaviours of its member states or nations. Under the Lemkin 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the term ‘genocide’ refers inter alia to the ‘deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or majority part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group’. The Convention was adopted by resolution 260 (III) of the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. Australia became a signatory to the Convention in 1949, but did not introduce specific domestic legislation to make genocide a crime. In 1999, genocide was still not an Australian crime, and was so ruled by justices Whitlam and Wilcox in 34 Nulyarimma v Thompson 1999 that customary international law did not form a part of Australian law and therefore genocide was not a crime under Australian law in the absence of legislation declaring genocide a crime. This remains the case fifteen years later. The proposed anti-genocide legislation by the Commonwealth Government has lapsed since 2008. In 2000, the Commonwealth Government passed legislation to prosecute crimes against humanity, but not genocide .Nor is ethnic cleansing a specific crime, arguably because it uses the methods of genocide to achieve its objectives. Until 2000, war criminals could find safe haven in Australia, among them Konrad Kalejs (involved in the Arajskomando killings in Latvia during the Holocaust and Ervin Viks (responsible for thousands of Estonian deaths). In 1961, Attorney-General Garfield Barwick refused a Russian request for Viks’ extradition. The political attitude seemed to be that genocide was (and is) unthinkable in Australia because we are a ‘moral’ country and that Australian 33 Rafael Lemkin (1900 – 1959) was a Polish lawyer and Jew who coined the word genocide in a paper called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (1944). After WWII he continued his campaign for international laws defining, preventing and punishing genocide, both physical and psychological. The Convention on Genocide was formally adopted by the UN in 1948 and came into force in 1951. 34 (1999) 96 FCR 153; (1999) 165 ALR 621; (1999) FCA 1192 http://www.austlii.edu.ay/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/1999/1192.html 14 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek citizens deserved the protection of Australian law. Clearly, politicians had a limited grasp of 35 our history. Henry Reynolds examines the question of intent in relation to genocide by arguing: Was the killing of indigenous people done with the specific intention of destroying particular groups, or did it happen as a consequence of action that had other motives, such as the taking of land, the imposing of a new order or the pacification of a violent frontier? 36 However, if a natural disaster occurs, such as a tsunami or a category 5 tropical cyclone or volcanism, can I argue that the disaster did not also cause the destruction of houses, the loss of crops, the degradation of water quality, the loss of life due to starvation and disease, that these were secondary. No, the destruction was part of the one event process. I cannot logically separate the trigger from the associated actionable components that are defined by the particular trigger. There was some triggering condition and the outcome was predictable within the process envelope, which encloses some specifiable and predictable pattern. It is predictable because it is repeatable. We have seen the pattern before and know what to expect. And if I intentionally take someone’s land with the intention to shoot them indiscriminately as a group if they return, it is clear that intentionality is embedded in a bounded and patterned process of actionable steps, with conditional triggers for the procedural actions forming a nested hierarchy of intent. And if I am encouraged by my Government to take land where I please, without restriction other than the possible imposte of some Government fee, and if I am free to kill Aboriginals without any real fear of punishment, because the Government is fearful that any restrictions or punishment might cause an assault to public order and generate a backlash that might put the Government and civil society at risk, are my actions any less egregious. And if homeless Aboriginals begin to starve, families begin to break up, Aboriginals women are preyed upon, and Aboriginal society begins to tear apart, can I really argue that these were an unexpected consequence of actions that had other motives, such as the expropriation of Aboriginal land, and were not an intended result of measured genocide? Within this hierarchy of intentionality, we cannot meaningfully separate primary causes from expected outcomes or consequences. The process of forcibly expropriating land will lead to a continuing processs of shootings (and other 35 Also see Colin Tatz, Confronting Australian Genocide, Aboriginal History 2001 Vol 25, and Genocide in Australia, Research Discussion Paper, AIATSIS, Number 9, 1999. http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/genocide/tatz.html 36 Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain, p. 27 15 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek violent actions proscribed by the Lemkin convention), of starvation, of family dissolution, of cultural destruction, until all the land is occupied by non-Aboriginals, a result of intentional Government policy that cannot legally or logically be distinguished from Lemkinian genocide. Reynolds’ argument is that the Aboriginal killing was an unintended consequence of land expropriation. The logic only holds true if pastoralists did not intend or foresee the consequences, when evidentially those consequences were both intentional and measured, as part of a protracted and one-sided land war that saw a catastrophic reduction exceeding 90% in the Aboriginal population over a period of 120 years. 37 In his 1999 paper, Colin Tatz observes: We have to look to the philosophy inherent in the legal wording of Article II, namely, that genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations. In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four, acts of genocide: first, the essentially private genocide, the physical killing committed by settlers and rogue police officers in the nineteenth century, while the state, in the form of the colonial authorities, stood silently by (for the most part); second, the twentieth-century official state policy and practice of forcibly transferring children from one group to another with the express intention that they cease being Aboriginal ; third, the twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed "half-caste" Aborigines; fourth, a prima facie case that Austrlia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them serious bodily or mental harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women without consent.) 38 I would agree, except for the assertion about ‘essentially private genocide, committed by settlers and rogue police’. At the beginning of settlement and up to 1838, the killings were carried out by the British military, supported by armed settlers. After 1838, colonial police were involved, acting on the instructions of the various state governments, and were hardly ‘rogue’. Nor were the killings ‘private’. Government had a policy of pastoralists’ armed self- protection, to augment the police, and there were almost no prosecutions for Aboriginal killings, apart from the notable exception of the 1838 Myall Creek massacre. 37 See FWAYAF, The Political Uses of Australian Genocide. 38 Colin Tatz, ibid, Genocide in Australia, p. 6 16 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide reads: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with 39 intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as 40 such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 41 In British jurisprudence and for most western jurisdictions, intent separates a planned from an unplanned act. It is incorrect to assume that all consequences of some planned act are unplanned acts, conferring diminished responsibility. An act is to do something because of something, to execute an actionable component or components because of some triggering condition. If I cause you serious disadvantage on the basis of your race and colour that impact upon your conditions of life, if I kill you, and steal your land, and remove your children, and impose eugenics, and move you to a detention centre, the acts are intentional and the evidence is a matter of record, although I may submit mitigationg arguments of self defence or that I was acting in good faith according to the standards of the time; but if you die as a nation in consequence, can I reasonably argue that I intended no lethal harm and the consequences could not be forseen? If I point a gun at you and then shoot you, or if I give you poisoned food to eat, the act is intentional; but in Criminal law, if there are no witnesses, the evidence may be circumstantial, the consequences of my act arguably becoming unintended in the unlikely event that I am prosecuted for my act. Yet if I blow up a rail road track (or dispossess you) and hundreds die in a subsequent train crash (or its equivalent), can I reasonably argue that the deaths were an unintended consequence of my act? British derived 39 Intent in the legal sense of mens rea (or ‘guilty mind’) means a prior intention to commit a criminal act, with the knowledge that the act is a crime [Macquarie]. The legal concept is fundamental within criminal law in order to establish guilt. There is no clearer exposition of intent than in extensive and repressive Government legislation, such as Aboriginal dispossession through land alienation, or official dispersal policy, or the Queensland Aboriginal Act (with amendments) and the state variations, which introduced a Reserve system of Aboriginal detention centres. 40 Beyond Article 2 a (mass killing by police and settlers, none of whom were convicted), Articles b, c, d, and e were a further key part of the Queensland Government’s pattern of oppression against Aboriginals that extended until the 1970s, and can be argued still continues today. 41 The full United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide can be found at www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide 17 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek law is forensic in attacking individual acts for their violent behaviour, but almost mute in criminalising patterned acts of mass murder and oppression, particularly if the state itself is implicated. This is not the whole story. Articles 3 and 4 then prescribe accountability. Article 3 states that: The following acts shall be punishable: a) Genocide; b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; d) Attempt to commit genocide; e) Complicity in genocide. Australia, by this clear definition, is accountable for genocide through its legislation and Aboriginal policies, which are a matter of public record. To dispel any remaining doubt, Article 4 further clarifies those who may be accountable, and makes clear that the state can be culpable by default. It specifies: Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. The UN Convention, through Article 4, makes clear that the State Executive Councils and their legislative bodies, along with police commissioners, certain Aboriginal protectors and many squatters are directly accountable for the UN crime of genocide, provided that the crime is recognised and can be prosecuted in Australian Law. While it is true that the wording of Articles 3 and 4 do not mention the state or nation state as a potentially culpable entity, it is not ruled out if a cross section of those who are potentially prosecuted comprise ipso facto the state. Many people still believe (wrongly) that genocide is the sole domain of article 2 (a) within the Convention. Lemkin clearly understood and explained that genocide embraced both physical and psychological (including cultural) destruction. He wrote: Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of 18 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals. 42 No clearer exposition can be given for the reality of Aboriginal genocide, where the Murdering Creek massacre was a small but determinable instance. What the Convention also makes transparent is that genocide is not limited to intentional, state sanctioned massacres. Many of us assume that genocide and ethnic cleansing are solely comprised of massacres, with the state required to be implicitly or explicitly involved in a deliberate culture and official practice of racially targeted killings, and that there must be a burden of legal proof, through official orders and court judgments and death records, that massacres were intentional and directed. This is not correct, as the United Nations Lemkin definition for genocide makes quite clear. Ethnic cleansing – genocide when sufficient numbers and a larger proportion of the unwanted racial (or cultural) group have been removed from (or destroyed within) an area – is not constrained to massacres alone. For Australia in general, and Queensland in particular (since we are examining the political context for Murdering Creek), Government ‘dispersal’ policy, supported by armed pastoralists, did some of the loathsome work; but Government legislation (supported by racist policies and practices), and an intentionally biased criminal justice system did the rest. Specific domestic law still does not prohibit acts of genocide within Australia, although we remain a ‘model litigant’ and signatory to the Lemkin Convention. This is the double speak of legal obfuscation, when the rights of oppressed minorities are legally denied in the national (commercial) interest. 42 Rafael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – An Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, Chapter IX: Genocide a new term and new conception for destruction of nations www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm 19 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Colin Tatz, an eminent historian and genocide scholar, reminds us that the UN legal definition of genocide is quite broad and allows few prosecutions, perhaps through a lack of will on the part of the Security Council. Nevertheless, the UN Convention is now fully adopted (in 2002) by the International Criminal Court into Article 6 of the Court’s statute. Colin carefully and methodically analyses the evidence for Australian genocide, using each article of the Lemkin Convention as a logical and legal sieve. 43 He concludes: Aborigines were killed, were the victims of bodily and mental harm, had birth-control measures imposed upon them and had their children forcibly transferred because of who they were. It does not matter that the killing or the harming did not always succeed: ‘success’ is not a factor in adjudging the commission of the crime. 44 In 1999, the High Court asserted that, consistent with the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, there was no constitutional restriction on Section 122 of the Constitution not to authorise acts of genocide. 45 Australia refuses to legislate specifically against the crime of genocide, preferring to keep its options open. 46 However, it has introduced legislation that prohibits crimes against humanity in accordance with International law, not quite the same as genocide, but with a degree of overlap where there is mass killing, yet not other forms of destruction, and not retroactively because of the pernicious (and largely wrong) ‘standards of the time’ argument which we have reinvented as reflexivity. Nor does the argument hold scrutiny that Governments mistreated Aboriginals with ‘the best of intentions, for their common good’, when there is clear evidence of mass killing, legislated oppression, eugenics, stolen wages, stolen children, and theft of Aboriginal land. How can it be ‘well intended’ to dispossess tribe after tribe, break up families, massacre those who resisted, and submit the remnant population to forced detention, subjugation and repression? In 1999, following the High Court decision on genocide, an Anti-Genocide Bill was proposed by the Australian Parliament, which would amend the genocide Convention Act 1949 to implement Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to ensure genocide is unlawful in Australia. The progress was inexcusably tardy and inconclusive, with the Government delaying as much as possible. On 13 October 1999, the amendment was introduced and read the first time. On 13 October 1999, a second reading was moved. On 5 April 2001, there was a second reading 43 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: 67 – 106, in the chapter Australia: Defining and Interpreting Genocide. 44 Ibid, p. 95. 45 Chris Cunneen, Julia Grix, The Limitations of Litigation in Stolen Generations Cases, AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper, Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney Law School, 2004: 11, 12. (Judge Gaudron) 46 http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=s230 20 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek debate, but on 13 February 2002, it was restored to the Notice Paper, and on 16 November 2004, it lapsed at the end of Parliament. On 17 November 2004, it was restored to the Notice paper, but on 12 February 2008, it lapsed once more. So Australia still does not have any domestic legislation that makes genocide a crime, in accordance with the UN Convention. There is no reason for Australia not to criminalise the internationally recognised crime of genocide, unless the Commonwealth Government is worried that it may be culpable. They may be right. Crimes against humanity As we are reminded (but not by Australia): 47 There are two federal statutes in Australia that refer to proceedings involving crimes against humanity: • Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), available at http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/ Legislation/ActCompilation1.nsf/0/5423704BFDAC4386CA2576EA0012 9CE7/$file/CriminalCode1995_WD02.pdf. • The relevant provisions in this legislation were inserted by the International Criminal Court (Consequential Amendments) Act 2002, available at http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/ActCompilation1.nsf/0/6 40800730D340CE5CA256F7100563577/$file/0422002.pdf. • International Criminal Court Act 2002 (Cth), available at http://www.comlaw. gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/ActCompilation1.nsf/0/FA56268B62FE5347 CA256F7100563077/$file/0412002.pdf. The Criminal Code Act 1995 provides that Australian courts can have jurisdiction in cases involving crimes against humanity, even if the offenses are also crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.48 Jurisdiction is available, whether or not the offense was committed in Australia. 49 47 United States Library of Congress, Crimes Against Humanity Statutes and Criminal Code Provisions in Selected Jurisdictions http://www.loc.gov/law/help/crimes-against-humanity/index.php It is difficult to find an index of such open access documents through Australian sources. 48 Criminal Code Act 1995 § 268.1; see also International Criminal Court Act 2002, § 3(2). The relevant offenses are set out in §§ 268.8 to 268.23 of the Code. 49 Id. §§ 268.117(1) & 15.4. 21 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek The Attorney-General must give permission for charges to be brought under these provisions. 50 There can be no double jeopardy, where a person has already been tried for the same offense in the International Criminal Court.51 The International Criminal Court Act 2002 sets out the procedural requirements relating to Australia’s cooperation with, and provision of assistance to, the International Criminal Court. 52 And there the issues must rest for a time, or at least until a process of Aboriginal recognition and reconciliation introduces its own morality into any public discussion and constitutional amendments, perhaps even a belated Bill of Rights, that must, or should accompany our journey into cultural pluralism. 50 Id. §§ 16.1 & 268.121. 51 Id. § 268.118. 52 Ibid, United States Library of Congress 22 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek Methodology53 Much of our history is in the form of oral narrative and myth. Can myths be analysed for their historicity? We live in an information-based society. Information around some subject area derives from a set of facts, each fact comprising data (nouns), operations or actions (verbs) and constraints: ‘{In the 1860s}, party of type stockmen {at} location of type Yandina homestead [shot at] party of type Aboriginals as they [made their way to] the location of type bora {near} location of type Yandina Creek’. We can verify or discount such facts when they comprise testable assertions, based on locations or events or dates. Fact based analysis 54 therefore becomes a useful tool in examining any narrative history, often mythical, a yarn or tall tale which can otherwise too easily be dismissed. We will use this tool among others when we come to our investigation into the myth of Murdering Creek. Theoretical system models are also a powerful investigative tool, rarely used by historians, who tend to rely upon the power of verbal arguments and theses, supported by selective quoting from various sources, weaving a certain threaded logic that may, or may not, adequately represent past reality. But what is reality? Human history, broadly speaking, is a picture of what happens in a certain delineated and circumscribed social system, say the contextual and reported history of the Murdering Creek event on the Sunshine Coast in the 1860s. Historians and social theorists often ignore detailed modelling for such systems, preferring to use words, photographs, selected quotes, and tables to attack the data and give it some kind of form. 55 There is also the general caution to avoid reflexivity, that is, to avoid judging the past from a modern perspective or with an observer bias. For this reason, we can often dismiss myths as a contextual referent or as non-testable folklore. Yet hard sciences routinely use analytical methodology as a potent means to develop coherent models from messy and conflicting data sets, which we then use to test theories against the data, and make predictions that are potentially falsifiable. The same approach is possible for us to enquire systematically into historiography (or meta-history), and the associated historicity. The investigative model proposed here is system based and graphical. It forms two primary levels of abstraction: the 53 This is a summary of the methodology and semantic typology set out in FWAYAF Political Uses of Australian Genocide. 54 Fact based analysis is one method to investigate the relationships between data and functions. But is not the only method. Object modelling is another, which identifies ‘services’ performed by some defined object, say a particular Government, based on some specified event, in order to achieve some expected outcome. However, fact based analysis, with a focus on processes, will suit our purpose here. Both methodological approaches embed the concept of intentionality. 55 ‘Theories are blind without data; data is lame without theories.’ The quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, but it probably originates, in a slightly modified form, with Emanuel Kant. Of course, the point is unambiguous: we need both. 23 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek meta-model (or type model) and the case instance (or type instantiation), although other levels are available as may be required by the forensic analysis. For any information system, we can structurally and relationally map data and functions (taking certain actions against data, such as ‘form shooting parties at Yandina homestead’) into a hierarchy, against which there are many possible and consistent logical views; processes (‘shoot Aboriginals’ , or ‘destroy evidence’ or ‘distribute poisoned flour’) each in the form ‘do this, then this’. For example, ‘aim, fire, re-load’ or ‘burn bodies’) can be ordered by generic organisational structures and responsibilities (‘remove Aboriginals from their land’) into specific taxonomic instantiations, from (‘disperse Kabi Aboriginals from the Mary Valley’) to (‘massacre a particular group of Aboriginals on the Mortimer property at Manumbar in 1861’). The typology conforms to a policy hierarchy, which specifies functions and data at different levels of abstraction. This hierarchy follows naturally from the politics of occupation and subjugation as an ordered set. We can also determine the relationships between data (and between data types). For example ‘form shooting parties at Yandina homestead’ can be normalised as a binary relationship, involving the entity ‘party’ with the attributes ‘type of’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘conditional trigger’, and the entity ‘Homestead’ with the attributes ‘type of’ and’ location’, with the bi-directional entity relationship ‘form at’ or ‘forms’. This kind of semantic precision is often required, albeit in a less analytic form, by the legal process. Any information system that seeks to automate the historical documentation and discovery process mandates such precision, perhaps as part of some future historiographic project. Such a system can go beyond basic searching and retrieval, to accelerating the process for establishing historicity, for which there are now proven software tools available. These tools include data mining that can look for patterns in a daataset, genetic algorithms that can evolve a dataset based upon a set of initial rules (or triggering conditions) to simulate the observed behaviour and emergent properties of complex systems, and neural networks that learn by example, such as ‘Watson’, which we recently encountered in the game of Jeopardy as a dominant competitor. Processes and their underlying workflows and events intersect functions and data in specific methods and services (‘establish flying detachments of mounted police’). However, I do not believe historians or social theorists have attempted this precursor modelling because of disputes over methodology. My introductory examples have some licence, 56 but the merits of testing narrative assertions for verifiable facts seem clear enough. Fact based analysis is a very straightforward first step for separating confirmable events from embellishment and hyperbole, particularly when anecdotal and narrative history assumes a 56 These and many other testable assertions, within the myths of Australian narrative history, are examined in greater detail in For We Are Young and Free Recollectios from a (Homicidal) Frontier [Gibbons, 2014] 24 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek larger importance against official and usually sanitised Government despatches, and where there is a relative absence of case law. The analytical framework allows us to determine the evidence for whether an event happened or did not happen. If it did happen, for example, was there a Yandina Station? Where was it located? What is its history? Who were the lessees? 57 Was there a bora at Yandina Creek? Who discovered the bora, and when? Did the Government take any steps taken to protect its cultural significance? What was the effect of specific land legislation on settler behaviour? What was the status of Aboriginal British relations as Aboriginal land was being expropriated? What happened to homeless Aboriginals, their families, and their society? Was the rule of British law upheld for all citizens, including Aboriginals? Were settlers prosecuted for killing Aboriginals? Was the settler land invasion curbed by Government or was it encouraged? What politicians and Governors were in power at the time of the Murdering Creek massacre, just after Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859? Who was involved in the Murdering Creek event (including the chain of command), how and where? What were the triggers? What actually happened at Murdering Creek? Such unofficial history, based on a set of ‘myths’, is often a more truthful reflection of collective behavioural psychology, usually apparent in 19th century letters or biographies, in building up a consistent historical picture of an event or events, particularly where there is no independently witnessed or recorded case history. The evidence is often circumstantial, such as the mysterious disappearance of entire groups of Aboriginal people from an area they had occupied for thousands of years, and their sudden replacement over twenty or so years by settlers and squatters, a complicit pas de deux. The kernels of testable assertions in narrative history are often discounted or ignored on the basis of adjectival ‘noise’, or quaint yarns, or racist twitter, or unsupportable (though generalised and endemic) hearsay, when they should be a rich mine of historical data and meta-data. 57 Many sources state that whites knew of the main bora at Yandina Creek from 1865. The primary source for these derivative comments regarding the Yandina Creek bora seems to be Steele, who states: ‘A bora ring has been preserved near Yandina Creek. It is situated in front of a house on a knoll about one kilometre west of the creek and about three kilometres north-east of Mount Ninderry. The ring, which is 16.5 by 14 metres in size, was known to white men as early as 1865; its use was discontinued before 1900’. Steele quotes his source as DAIA file KC: A29. But the reference is circular: the DAIA file refers back to Steele as the source. Therefore, Steele’s 1865 date cannot be verified. [John Steele, Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River, p. 178]. Steele fails to mention that the use of the bora was ’discontinued before 1900’ because those who could use it, and for whom it had important cultural significance, had been removed from the surrounding area, often violently, or if not violently, through legislated dispossession and forcible relocation. It is more likely that the bora was known to whites from at least 1862, when someone working for Scott, who was the lessee of the Yandina run, built a homestead near the bora, and which Bull records was the cause of great antagonism between whites and Aboriginals, for whom the bora was a sacred place. We know that the Scott homestead existed from 1862, because we have the evidence of a dated hand drawn map by Pettigrew, which he used to support a land application. Pettigrew’s map shows the ‘Scot’ homestead near Yandina Creek. 25 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek The historical evidence for intentional Australian genocide is complicated and relatively contentious, because there may be misconceptions on the nature of genocide, 58 or the facts may be denied, or the legal corroborative material may be sparse. There is a temptation to simplify an historical investigation, and to examine individual events in isolation from larger patterns. Such examinations tend to rely on Government dispatches, official Government reports, and Government published land policies and legislation, all of which are readily available from the public record with the investment of a little time. However, gazetted legislation and Government correspondence should not replace the abundant narrative and oral history, myths, which lie sprawling all around us, not significantly or sufficiently analyzed, not, that is, by the reasonable standards of modern historians. Myths are different from factual history. They are generally fractal in nature, each reflecting an entire context, and require different analytical tools. By examining any one myth, we can access the whole range of myths that encompass our narrative history. Much of this history is slowly becoming entombed or crumbling away, because it is old, or is not available online due to cost constraints or lack of interest. Cultural amnesia 59 is the inevitable result and a degraded and less-informed society our common loss, our contrived and imagined memories - a mythical 19th century British version of the dreamtime - the legacy for our children. But it need not be. 60 As a key part of our investigative method, we will use process models as a diagnostic and analytic tool to understand the behaviours and events that drove a specific actionable component within ethnic cleansing and led to its melancholy outcome. A process is a set of events or actionable components that are related by some shared triggering condition and work together for some defined outcome. For example, ethnic cleansing and its associated processes and activity strings (actionable components) occurred area by area, case by case, each case unique, but when each case is analysed against the same diagnostic model, we find the independent variable (pattern of oppression for a specific case instance) correlates closely 58 The subject is examined further in For We Are Young And Free The Political Uses of Australian Gnocide [Gibbons, 2014]. 59 I borrow this term from the excellent book by Clive James (2007), Cultural Amnesia, W.W. Norton, New York. Much of our written history is being lost, awareness of our past progressively forgotten, slowly sliding into irrelevance as publishing runs expire. Even the Historical Records of Australia, Series III, still in copyright, I had to obtain second-hand from a UK source. If we have not the means of remembering the past, except through elongated library searches and overseas acquisitions, how can we not repeat past mistakes, our cultural history hoisted on shire-subsidized hagiography. 60 Michel Foucault examines the role of the ‘archives’ in the Archaeology of Knowledge, where he deconstructs the ‘system of relations between the known and unknown’. What we know, if not properly ‘remembered’, can quickly become unknown, as happens when books go out of print, or historical records become increasingly inaccessible. 26