David Marr on the bloody history of the Frontier Wars on ABC's 7.30 | Newcastle Herald | April 6, 2024 - video Dailymotion

Newcastle Herald

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00:00 David Maher, what was more shocking to you, discovering your ancestors had been

00:05 employed to kill Aboriginal people or the apparently industrial scale on which

00:10 that was occurring? Well the first shock, I mean shocks can come like a blow and

00:18 that was like a blow. I found myself sitting there looking at a picture of my

00:24 great-great-grandfather in the uniform of the native police and my world hasn't

00:34 been the same since that moment. It was a huge shock but I knew within half an

00:42 hour that I had to write a book about it because you know I've been telling

00:47 people for decades we have to face the past and I fought in the history wars

00:52 under the banner of Manning Clark. I thought I knew the fundamental story,

00:57 I've read the books, I'm a huge admirer of Henry Reynolds and his cohort

01:04 of historians but it's much much worse than I had thought. What did you know

01:11 about the native police before you started? When I saw Reggie Ewer in this

01:16 uniform I thought for a wonderful moment that I might be mistaken about the

01:22 native police. They might have been quite a nice outfit I thought and I went

01:27 quickly to Wikipedia. No, they were not only exactly what I thought they were

01:31 but Reg Ewer's exploits were there in Wikipedia and so were his brother Darcy's.

01:38 They were notorious killers. People who have seen what I've written are shocked

01:44 to discover about the native police. They maybe heard the name but it is a

01:50 discovery for people who are even well read on the business of the Australian

01:55 frontier. A killer, a band of killers that operated for 60 years and killed, well

02:06 all of their records have disappeared, presumed destroyed, but scholars working

02:11 on the kinds of ratios of how many blacks died for every white are now

02:15 talking about the possibility that this band killed 40,000 people, 40,000

02:22 Aboriginal people in its time. Because you were tracing your family's

02:28 particular connection you do sort of cut a swathe, shall we say, through a

02:32 particular history from, shall we say, the Murrumbidgee north and it seems to get

02:37 worse the further north it goes. What I've written is a narrative history of

02:44 the native police through the eyes of a family that backed it, directed it and

02:50 served in it and in this way by cutting a path as you say a swathe through that

02:57 history it's possible to see the landscape much more clearly than in some

03:03 of the very very fine historical studies. This is the narrative, this is the story,

03:07 this takes this family from its days of land taking on a gigantic scale,

03:14 600,000 acres of land, politics, the economy, the way in which this system of

03:23 killing was set up and then its work and you're right, the further it went north

03:31 really the worse it became and the killings were notorious. This was an

03:39 armed band of killers working for the Queensland Government which was quite

03:45 happy to admit at the same time that there was no law to authorise them to do

03:51 the killings they were doing. They didn't care about that a bit. It's hard not to

03:56 read the book in September 2023 and think about the resonances it has about

04:05 the sort of racism we're seeing in the debate around the referendum now. Tell us

04:12 a little bit about whether you were struck by some of those things and the

04:16 sorts of things that were said at that time. The arguments, I mean I was under

04:20 the delusion that the notion of sort of attacks on woke people were kind of

04:28 invented maybe 15 or 20 years ago but they weren't. In the 1830s there are

04:38 newspapers, one of them belonging to that appalling windbag Wentworth, who attacked

04:45 what he called the whalers for Aborigines, the people who were saying

04:49 don't shoot, don't steal, these are human beings. They were attacked for living in

04:55 the cities, being elite, not knowing what they were talking about and showing off

05:01 their humanitarian views. It's exactly the same. That same argument is still

05:08 being used nearly two centuries later. John Howard used to talk about the

05:14 black-armed band view of history and say that we couldn't be held accountable

05:18 or shouldn't feel guilty about what had happened back in the day. You say in your

05:25 book that you've written it as an act of atonement. What do you feel about your

05:32 connection with your family's history in this now? I'm not guilty. I didn't

05:37 lift up a rifle, I wasn't riding into a camp at dawn but I am ashamed. In the

05:44 same way that we can be really proud of what our family has done you know

05:47 generations ago, we can also be ashamed. But that kind of personal shame started

05:53 to look almost trivial as my research and writing went on. The shame is

06:01 national and that notion of you know sneering at people for writing the truth

06:10 of what happened in this country is so John Howard. But there are still people

06:15 around who think that the history of Australia is cook, convicts, sheep, gold,

06:25 Gallipoli. It's not. In between and behind all of that this country was being

06:33 conquered by Europeans. The true history of this country is a history of conquest

06:39 and we now live, we European Australians now live with the conquered and we have

06:48 decent obligations to them as we always have decent obligations to the enemy we

06:56 defeat. That sense of decent obligation is being trashed in the referendum

07:05 debate. Trashed. You know I've spent four and a half years in this history

07:13 writing this story of what went on and I look at the referendum debate and I

07:21 think these wars haven't finished. This is just another round. It's just going on

07:31 and how long does it go on for? Does it go on forever? David Marr thanks so much for

07:37 talking to us. Thanks Laura.

07:41 you

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07:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]

David Marr on the bloody history of the Frontier Wars on ABC's 7.30 | Newcastle Herald | April 6, 2024

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