Revisionist rednecks

Among left-liberal Australians and New Zealanders, castigating white Australians for their treatment of Aborigines is a popular pastime.

However, the popular conception that the peace-loving Aborigines were massacred by rich white run holders who strode around on horseback knocking off fleeing Abo’s at will, may well be a delusion of revisionist historians.

In The Original Australians, archaeologist Josephine Flood challenges a number of misconceptions regarding conflict between Europeans and Aborigines in 19th Century Australia.

According to Flood, introduced diseases were by far the biggest killer of Aborigines in the 19th Century. Even in Central Australia, where there was intense pressure for water holes, and conflict between whites and Aborigines was very intense, Aboriginal deaths from diseases such as measles and smallpox still exceeded those from settler’s guns.

Flood’s own research into a region of South East Victoria in the mid 19th Century indicated no loss of Aboriginal life from guns, but a staggering 90 percent mortality through new diseases.

Contrary to popular belief, Flood points out that some of these new diseases may actually have arrived in Australia from Indonesia before Europeans arrived in Botany Bay:

"Historian Judy Campbell has made a compelling case that all Australia’s smallpox epidemics originated in Indonesia, where the disease was endemic and outbreaks occurred in the 1780s, 1820s, 1860s and 1870s. Fenner agrees that "origin from the Macassans is most likely," as does Campbell Macknight, an expert on the Macassans."

Flood’s investigations also reveal that it was extremely unlikely that early British colonists would have been able to deliberately pass on smallpox through infected material such as scabs kept in bottles, as some 1980s newspapers articles have argued.

The so-called extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines is generally regraded as the most infamous example of European aggression against indigenous Australians.

However, there was no premeditated campaign to exterminate the island's indigenous population. Most of the planned raids by local militia resulted in relatively few Aborigines being killed or captured, since the Aborigines were able to use their local knowledge of the rugged terrain to make their escape.

Those Tasmanian Aborigines who were deliberately shot by Europeans, were usually killed during grim, drawn out clashes with isolated homesteaders, who also suffered high casualties during Aboriginal reprisals.In terms of the death rate from armed conflict, whites in Tasmania suffered the highest death rate of any European population in 19th Century Australia, with two white settlers killed for every three Aborigines.

The highest number of Aboriginal deaths through armed conflict actually occurred in Queensland during the middle to late 19th CenturySince Queensland was settled later than other states, its settlers had access to modern, breech-loading guns, which gave them a decisive edge in firepower.

However, even in Queensland, many Aboriginal deaths occurred not at the hands of white settlers, but at the hands of the often-ruthless Native Mounted Police, who were notorious for taking few prisoners.

As Flood states:"Conflict in Australia was always small scale. There were no citizen’s militias and colonists only prevailed when supported by native police - armed and mounted Aboriginal trackers."

While there were certainly unjust reprisals in outback history, in which many Aborigines died at the hands of Europeans, revisionist historians have not been above exaggerating such reprisals or even inventing massacres that did not exist.

For example, historian Neville Green, wrote an entirely unsubstantiated account of a massacre at Forrest Hill in Western Australia in 1926, which has recently been exposed by western Australian journalist Rod Moran in his 1999 book Massacre Myth.

Before Left-liberal New Zealanders and urban Australians accuse provincial Australians of being intolerant rednecks for their past and present treatment of Aborigines, perhaps they should start addresses their own redneck ignorance of factual history.