LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

CHRISTIANS AND MASSACRES

SIR: Keith Windschuttle's article on frontier massacres (November 2000) ends on a revealing note. After having criticised Henry Reynolds for making a conservative and educated estimate of the number of Aborigines killed by frontier violence, Windschuttle offers his own explanation as to why future regional studies are likely to arrive at a smaller tally than the 20,000 claimed by Reynolds.

According to Windschuttle, powerful legal and cultural prohibitions existed in colonial Australia: "For a start, most colonists were Christians to whom such actions were abhorrent." "Most" implies some statistical analysis, yet no national arithmetic is produced to justify his assessment of the Christian conscience--an instructive indicator of his commitment to scholarship.

Even if most Europeans on the frontier described themselves as Christian, this was no guarantee that precept and practice would coincide. In the interests of acquiring land, theological "justifications" often distorted Christ's teaching. The secular impulse emanating from the Enlightenment also used reason, science and progress as "legitimate" premises for the pursuit of self-interest and materialism.

George Carrington, who recorded his travels in north Queensland in the 1860s in Colonial Adventures and Experience by a University Man, put it succinctly: "The argument seems to be, that God never intended them [the Aborigines] to live long in the land in which He placed them ... the white man ... will utterly destroy them ... and possess the land". One of the most efficient means of disposing of the Aboriginal people was the Native Mounted Police force. According to Charles Eden, who published My Wife and I in Queensland in 1872, this institution was an indispensable counter-insurgency force: "a choice between the protection of the pastoral industry of the country or the abandonment of that pursuit by the colonists". Eden hastened to add a theological dimension to his reasoning: "nay, further, it was a choice between the sons of Japhet and the sons of Cush, for they could not coexist".

Windschuttle has also claimed that even those whose consciences would not have been troubled knew it was against the law to shoot Aborigines and that the penalty was death. The shipwrecked sailor James Morrill spent seventeen years with Aborigines in north Queensland before he eventually presented himself to the colonists in 1863. He was a witness to the violence which was occurring on the frontier. In his short booklet published soon after his return, Among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland, Morrill instanced the killing by the Native Mounted Police of his friends at Cape Upstart as well as another party of fifteen Aborigines--a massacre?--who had been on a fishing expedition. Windschuttle's claim that there would always be someone likely to report such actions is certainly correct in this instance, but I have never been able to locate any evidence of a subsequent inquiry or consequences.

A comment in the Port Denison Times (Bowen) in March 1867 could be seen as a summary of "Christian" conduct on the frontier: where Aborigines take one life, "we take fifty, exacting not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but as many eyes or teeth as we can possibly get ..."