More submissions and evidence to Yoorrook Justice Commission, Victoria

'Some of the things I've encountered in this research are the worst things I have ever heard of anyone doing to anyone in all of human history.' (Dr William Pascoe in a submission to the Commission)

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As Defending Country has noted previously, there is a trove of evidence in the submissions to the Commission and the public hearings it held. Here is a small sample (readers should then go to the complete evidence and submissions, which are well-indexed):

Suzannah Henty, art historian and teacher, descendant of Henty family of Portland, evidence, 28 March 2024

'I am a sixth-generation patrilineal descendant of James Henty, one of the Henty brothers and early colonisers of Gunditjmara Country in south-west Victoria. My family has been celebrated and remembered as establishing the first settlement in Victoria.' (page 4, transcript)

'Descendants of colonial families need to engage in good faith with local Indigenous communities to discuss reparation. I would encourage not only descendants of colonial families but all settlers living on stolen land to challenge the recent rhetoric of gratitude to Indigenous people for "letting us live on their land" because we stole it, and we usurped their sovereignty. To deny the rightful owners - to deny the rightful ownership and self-determination of the land that was stolen - is to deny First Nations people the right to life.' (page 5)

'The plaques that I have included [in her submission] and the monuments I have included in particular make reference to ‘'firstness". And this is why I'm drawing our attention to them. For the first permanent settlers, we know that's not true. This is producing a colonial myth, which is why they need to be removed. Because it's perpetuating a lie.' (page 7)

'MS MCLEOD [Counsel Assisting]: So can I invite your response to the number of memorials, place names, parks, roads and other places [in the Portland area] named in honour of those colonial forebears?

MS HENTY: Yes. I think it shows how obsessed the settler colony is with creating a narrative around its legitimacy, which is, like I said, based on lies. It shows colonial anxieties, and it's - I think - well, it's embarrassing. I really want the Henty family to be correctly written into history and I think that these spaces, they obscure that.' (page 9)

'I - there have been five generations of Henty family members who have not said anything, and I don't want to be part of the sixth generation who doesn't say anything ... I think because settler colonies really have no legitimacy, they need to create stories. And the Henty family were one of many and they have been chosen because of their status of "firstness" to - like I said, to kind of create an ancestral figure for the nation state to sort of - yeah, to have an inheritance. But it's not heritage. It is not actually - maybe it's heritage now because the State says it is, but they - their function was to kind of create - to create heritage, to manufacture heritage.

I think the monuments expose themselves by saying "first", and like I said before, settler colonies, they have codes that they have adopted and they have appropriated from the empire to symbolise what a nation should look like, what a nation should be, and they used those codes and heritage monuments, memorialisation, families and figures to celebrate are those codes and that's what was used here. They were used here to, yeah, produce - to produce a heritage for people to feel like they belong where they don't.' (pages 11, 13)

Age (Tony Wright) report of Ms Henty's evidence; 216 comments.

Comment from Defending Country (David Stephens): We could see 'overseas war memorialisation' (as occurs in the Australian War Memorial and other commemorative places) in the same light as the 'founding settler memorialisation' described by Ms Henty. Overseas war memorialisation builds up 'service and sacrifice' in our overseas wars as the foundation of the Australian nation. The other side of that memorialisation is forgetfulness or denial about the Australian (Frontier) Wars and the death and dispossession they caused.

The Australian Wars should be seen as essential to the foundation of the nation, as Professor Henry Reynolds has forcefully stated. Founding settler memorialisation builds up the settlers who were responsible for that death and dispossession; in that form of memorialisation, too, death and dispossession recedes from view.

‍Professor Raymond Lovett, Ngiyampaa, Centre of Epidemiology for Policy and Practice, Australian National University, evidence, 28 May 2024

Professor Lovett discusses Closing the Gap as an initiative towards equity, then goes on:

'[W]e need to deal with the underlying issue that stops us from investing in equity, which is racism. If we have to talk about racism and why we can't invest or why we can't create equity, we need to talk about settler colonisation and processes that have occurred over history but are also continuing because settler colonisation is an ongoing project, as is racism.

'So we haven't been able to, one, talk about racism, the R-word as we describe it, but more broader than that, racism is but one manifestation of settler colonisation, and we definitely don't seem to want to have a conversation about that in this country either ...

'So we, as Australians, might understand some of that history, but the primary purpose of settler colonisation in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country, there were two mechanisms. So, one is to remove us physically from the land, because the land is the resource that was acquired by settlers to enact their resource base. But there was a problem still. We were still around. [There is then] the elimination of the native by these two processes of physical removal to the margins and then also the assimilation policies around, well, if we can't get rid of people, then we absorb them into the population somehow.' (page 5 of transcript)

'So you do not protect people by rounding them up en masse, and if you don't shoot them or murder them, you then transport them miles away from their homelands, put them in segregated communities, ask them - well, you don't ask them. You tell them what they will eat, how they will behave. You tell them when they can leave that segregated area. In fact, you ask them to sign - what were they called - we call them dog tags to say that if you leave this area, you are never able to return to your family and never able to associate.' (page 6)

'[O]ne of the things I often think about, when I think about Closing the Gap, the Indigenous versus non-Indigenous lines, is what it represents for me is how well settler colonisation has been implemented in this country. So the larger the inequity, the more settler colonisation is having an impact, and the racist, or racism present in our current systems, how much they are impacting on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. But that's just me, how I think about what those lines mean.' (page 7)

'If we really want to understand what is creating inequity, we really need to interrogate settler colonialism and the racism that has manifested from it.' (page 8)

'I'm a product of settler colonialism. Like, you know, grandmother, Stolen Generation, Cootamundra Girls Home in New South Wales. Very fortunate that she was able to reconnect with family. She's no longer with us, but - sorry - she is the person that I look to the most in terms of what I do every day. There's a photo I have sitting on my desk of her and my oldest brother, who was also removed, as the thing that keeps ... my fire alight and why I do the work I do. So, you know, these systems have tried, have failed in terms of my own personal experience, but I am acutely aware every day that we've got an absolute long way to go. And I hope to be part of it for a lot longer.' (page 27)

Dr William Pascoe, Historical Frontier Violence Project Team, University of Melbourne, submission, 22 November 2024

Dr Pascoe's submission and his other evidence contains much detail about massacres and resistance, including material derived from the University of Newcastle massacres project. He concludes his submission thus:

Judy Atkinson, a Yiman elder and a psychologist with expertise in trauma, says that sometimes, trauma doesn't fade away with time, but gets worse in a negative spiral with each generation. Sexual violence such as rape and abduction was sometimes the trigger for escalating violence leading to massacres. After these massacres women were used for sex. Children were raised as stockmen and domestics. Every generation since this period of open violence has had to deal with new forms of violence such as removals, labour exploitation, eugenics, rape, alcohol and drug abuse, destruction of sacred sites, destruction of the environment, dog licences, stolen children and deaths in custody, and each generation has had to adapt new forms of resistance.

I was speaking with an elder last year in a community ... He has seen his friend shot and has been a witness to deaths in custody enquiries. For him, these massacres are still happening today. He won't visit massacre sites, because it's too much for him. He says, "Look inside what happened. Not only that it happened, but what happened during it. It's not just the massacre. It's the way it's done. Massacres are inhuman but this is beyond inhumanity."

Some of the things I've encountered in this research are the worst things I have ever heard of anyone doing to anyone in all of human history.

This is all still with us. As part of the History of Violence project, working with people in the Gomeroi (Kamilaroi) community in NSW, who were highly impacted by massacres around the same time as massacres in Victoria [mid 19th century], individuals interviewed all described their situation today as "survival'. Aboriginal people have never ceded sovereignty, never given up, and are still fighting to survive. (pages 7-8 of submission)

‍Emeritus Professor Henry Reynolds, University of Tasmania, evidence, 27 March 2024

(Professor Reynolds is one of Defending Country's distinguished Patrons. Use our Search engine to find his articles on this website. DC)

Professor Reynolds summarised the rapid expansion of squatting in the then colony of New South Wales (including what is now Queensland and Victoria) after 1830. He continued:

'[T]his period saw a rapid increase in the destruction of traditional society. Partly, simply by the presence of millions of animals that stormed into the country and, in a way, took over the country in a way that wasn't done in a human sense, simply by the animals occupying the land. And quite distorting, quite upsetting the way in which the local people could live there. But there was also no doubt in the mind of the British that this was leading to a great increase in the frontier violence, the conflict and the killing of First Nations people ... And there's no doubt that this was probably one of the most tragic periods for First Nations people, both because of the speed of the occupation and undoubtedly the amount of violence and the killing that took place in this period.' (page 7 of transcript)

Discussion followed on statistics of massacres, referring to the University of Newcastle work, and revealing that the number of massacres peaked in Victoria in the 1840s, the height of squatting expansion. Professor Marcia Langton, University of Melbourne, another witness, commented: 'The massacre records are the tip of the iceberg. It is unlikely that most of the killing was recorded, because if the killings were executed by, say, shepherds and the workers for the squatters, then they likely couldn't read and write. So, we don’t know what they did because they wouldn’t have been able to write it down. So, this map [based on the Newcastle work] is - it must be an underestimate of the killings but there is clearly a correlation between the squatters' runs and the known killings.' (page 22)

PROFESSOR REYNOLDS: 'I mean, the definition of a massacre, I'm not completely happy with. But, yes, I'm sure the killing was general. The other point that needs to be emphasised is that there was a code of silence on the frontier. Now, you didn't have to - you didn't have to necessarily take part in any of these - you know, these expeditions to kill people, but you couldn't talk about it. You didn't have to hold a gun but you had to hold your tongue, and everyone knew what had happened locally, but no one talked about it. And so that so much of what happened got covered by a very, very powerful code of silence. And if you didn't keep to the code of silence, you probably would have got driven out of the district.' (page 23)

There was discussion of sovereignty and Professor Reynolds responded:

'Well, that raises that whole question of, is it conquest, is it warfare? And they're questions that still remain very, very difficult in Australia. When people say the land was never ceded, well, that's absolutely - it was never ceded, but the argument could be, no, it was simply taken as a fruit of conquest, which up until, after the Second World War, was an accepted way to gain sovereignty.

'So that whole question of warfare, of conflict, of sovereignty still is totally - you know, is simply not really open for discussion. Even the simplest one like recognising the conflict as warfare, and, therefore, should be dealt with significantly by the Australian War Memorial, let alone the question of sovereignty and how sovereignty - I mean, Mabo implicitly says of course the Aboriginal people had sovereignty because they exercised laws which can now be recognised. But they can't take that final step and try and deal with the question of pre-existing sovereignty.' (pages 29-30)

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‍Earlier posts: other Yoorrook submissions; Moschion et al History of Violence Project submission on intergenerational effects of massacres.

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‍Picture credit: A world map showing all the truth and reconciliation commissions in Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile

2010 (Warko/Wikipedia/Creative Commons)