Paul Daley - Myall Creek, Australia : here, in 1838, a crime that would not be forgotten took place // Rock art as record of imperialism
Remembering is central to healing the pain of injustice and
atrocity.
Indigenous
Australians have a way of remembering, the good and the bad, through
oral history and art that passes memories down through the generations. I know of parts of central west New South Wales where the
Indigenous women still talk in vivid detail about their ancestors who died
after eating the bread, carefully laced with strychnine, that some of the
settlers left outside the kitchens for them. They still talk also about the Wiradjuri warrior
Wyndradyne, and his battles around Bathurst with the colonial soldiers and
settlers, as if his death happened yesterday rather than 190 years ago.
Closer to my home in Canberra the Indigenous people of the
district – the Walgalu-speaking Ngambri and Ngurmal, the Wallabalooa and the
Cookmai of the Ngunnawal language group – can still tell you all about the
pioneering families whose properties are stained with Indigenous blood and
stories of violent reprisal and murder. A wound can’t properly heal unless its cause is properly
identified. To know our history – ancient and recent – is to know who walked
before us and made our country what it is. It is to know ourselves.
This weekend people from all over Australia, black and
white, will converge on Myall Creek – a tiny place with two overgrown tennis
courts and a memorial hall – that you’d hardly call a town in a small part of
north-west NSW known evocatively, given its violent history, as New England.
Here in 1838 a group of stockmen killed 28 unarmed Wirrayaraay old men, women
and children.
The Myall Creek Massacre, as it came to be known, was not
the first of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such crimes that unfolded
across the colonial frontier between the first inhabitants, soldiers, settlers,
vigilante groups and Indigenous “black police”. The last is commonly regarded
to have been at Coniston,
Northern Territory, in 1928 – notwithstanding the countless other acts
of extreme violence (including custodial deaths) inextricably linked to
colonialism, that have since been perpetrated against Indigenous Australians.
But Myall Creek is unique: it is the only massacre on the colonial or post-colonial frontier where non-Indigenous murderers of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people have been convicted. Seven of the killers hung. Myall Creek was also instrumental for killers of blacks – a lesson that spread across the continent like a Mallee wildfire: cover your tracks by properly disposing of the bodies; leave no witnesses.
In 2000, when the first of what are now annual June
long-weekend commemorations at Myall Creek took place, descendants of victims
and killers united in an act of mutual apology and forgiveness. Every year at Myall Creek since 2000 it’s been the same:
sorrow and forgiveness. In 2008 the then prime minister Kevin Rudd delivered an
apology to the “stolen generation”. Freighted in legality, it stopped well
short of the far wider, general, national apology that the colonial violence
against this continent’s Indigenous people demands from both contemporary
British and Australian governments. The Myall Creek apology stands as an evocative metaphor for
that unfulfilled national need.
As NSW
Labor politician Paul Lynch has said: “There was some discussion at the
[2013] event of the concept of Myall Creek being developed nationally in the
form of an apology for all the massacres. One would have thought that that
would be a necessary preliminary to constitutional recognition of Aboriginal
people.” Indeed.
Graeme Cordiner, a member of the national committee of
Friends of Myall Creek, which promotes the yearly commemoration, says: “At
Myall Creek there’s been an apology – and a national apology of that sort is,
of course, the unfinished ‘sorry’ business of this country. Amid the talk of
constitutional recognition and even treaty, we as a nation should apologise for
the way the continent was taken.”
Unfortunately, plenty of Australians might prefer to
advocate moving on from the past. Noel Pearson, prime minister Tony Abbott’s foremost seer on
most Indigenous matters, recently challenged Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Australians to get over their traumatic history much, as he claimed,
that Holocaust survivors had. Reactionaries,
predictably, applauded.
Pearson’s critics – and I’m happy to back them on this –
naturally stress that commemorations and apologies for the great crime of the
Holocaust are, appropriately, perpetual. There have been legal reparations,
insufficient of course, but symbolically incisive. John
Maynard, an Indigenous history professor who is currently researching
Aboriginal servicemen, will give a guest speech at Sunday’s Myall Creek
commemoration. I asked Maynard, grandson of the early Indigenous activist
Fred Maynard, what importance he attached to commemorating events like Myall
Creek.
He says: “It seems a strange and hypocritical contradiction
that some black and white politicians tell us we need to ‘move on’ and not
dwell upon the frontier wars of the past whilst at the same time we are
saturated with ‘Lest We Forget’ Gallipoli – a failed (allied, including
Australian) invasion of another peoples’ country. Myall Creek and Coniston are
two of the more prominent Aboriginal massacre sites and as such stand as
markers not just for the horrific crimes that took place at these locations but
reflect additionally the multitude of silences that remain across the wider
continent.
“I think for me having the honour to speak at the Myall
Creek Memorial this year I will certainly reflect not just on those who lost
their lives at that site but use the location and day to remember all of those
who lost their lives in places forgotten, missed and purposefully erased from
both memory and the record.” And that’s why remembering matters.
It's old and it's fragile but rock art from the 'stone country' lives to tell its tales
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/jun/03/its-old-and-its-fragile-but-rock-art-from-the-stone-country-lives-to-tell-its-tales
