Was the conflict war or something less than war? That’s the fundamental question. It was possible for Europeans to accept that there was conflict but not see it as war: it was too scattered, too small-scale, it didn’t have the dignity of war. (Henry Reynolds, The Australian Wars, episode 3, 2022)
David Marr's Killing for Country (2023) is but the most recent work using newspapers, personal recollections and archives to write the history of frontier conflict in Queensland. Before Marr we read Tim Bottoms, Ray Evans, Noel Loos, Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Henry Reynolds, Jonathan Richards, Bill Thorpe and others. (See Defending Country's Queensland reading list.)
There have also been the long-running and diligent efforts of Ray Kerkhove. Kerkhove's most recent publication was How They Fought: Indigenous Tactics and Weaponry of Australia’s Frontier Wars (2023) but this review article considers four earlier (2019-20) pieces by him either solo or jointly, plus an article by Samuel C. Duckett White from 2023. The last mentioned was open access, the others came as pdfs from Kerkhove (for which we thank him).
Much of this material concerns 'the architecture and archaelogy of frontier conflict', though it is not straightforward to extrapolate from construction techniques to evidence of warfare. The material also shows there was resistance as well as massacres and that the whites' 'enemies' were not always black. Finally, it reveals the economic and reputational aspects of frontier conflict, reminding us that this conflict affected whitefellers as well as blackfellers.
On architecture and archaelogy first, which is the main concern of Kerkhove and four fellow authors (Defending Country distinguished Supporters Heather Burke and Lynley Wallis, Cathy Keys and Bryce Barker) in this Aboriginal History article. The authors look at sources (mostly reminiscences) describing 97 domestic structures across Queensland and conclude that, while 'fortified domestic structures were more common than previously envisaged ..., defensive features were usually minimal - holes in walls and barrable doors, windows or other ports of entry'.
Following the authors' impressive detailing, including illustrations, of 'the architectural materialisation of anxiety', they quote with approval a remark of social archaeologist Denis Byrne, writing in 2003 about 'nervous landscapes':
Byrne discussed the heritage of segregation as a landscape "tense with racial foreboding, paranoia, longing and deprivation", that used a variety of physical, legislative and other means to keep groups of people separate. In terms of the conflict over and on the Queensland frontier the issue is not only how close (physically) people were allowed to come to one another, but how that proximity was regulated through fear and arbitrated through violence.
Another 2020 article from Kerkhove concludes that
"frontier war" designs and structures ... once dominated Queensland’s landscape: fortified camps, military posts, barracks, rural layouts, prospectors’ stockades, fortified telegraph stations, and fortified homesteads. These layouts and features were minimal compared to fortifications on other continents, yet they indicate early Queensland was much more militarized and fearful than is commonly acknowledged.
Map of Queensland 1859, showing sparse settlement and limited extension into Indigenous Country (Wikimedia Commons; unknown author). See also: Queensland Historical Atlas maps on the pastoral expansion of Queensland.
Whether Queensland buildings were built in a particular way for defensive purposes or they came to serve those purposes incidentally seems less important than that the perceived need for frontier defence was a central part of the Queensland psyche for six or seven decades. Guarding against First Nations was by no means the sole concern of Queensland builders, however. Kerkhove and Cathy Keys provide a comprehensive summary of 'defensive surveillance of convicts and foreigners as a defining element of early Queensland architecture (1820s-1880s)'. Keeping Russians and Aboriginals out, and keeping convicts in, was clearly a strong theme north of the Tweed. Perhaps it persists even today.*
Settler fear was driven partly by knowledge that First Nations resisted; they were not just the objects of massacres or poisoning. Kerkhove's 2019 article about events on North Stradbroke Island c. 1827-32 shows that local First Nations people, even today, insist on using the term 'battle' about what happened. Kerkhove explores contemporary accounts and more recent First Nations commentary and reconstructs the military tactics employed by both sides:
Eventually, according to the Campbell/Welsby account, the soldiers made a charge, whereupon the natives ran in a body towards Nurry Nurry Wy, at which place they knew they could be protected by the swampy grounds, deeply studded with tussocky grass and much reed. The soldiers followed, and shot from time to time singly and in volleys ... This final phase was possibly a mock retreat, as it drew the soldiers even deeper into country that was advantageous to the warriors. The ground here is very waterlogged, making movement perilous. Now the warriors could attack "in a crouching manner", hiding unseen among reeds and tussocks:
"They used to crawl through the grass to about twenty yards distance, rise suddenly, discharge a shower of weapons, and disappear as silently and completely as if they had never been there, and the volleys of musketry whistled harmlessly over their heads."
Dale Ruska [descendant of massacre survivor] says this was achieved by a technique his people still use: '[Our warriors] could crawl through without being seen ... our people would lay a stick or spear to push down the tussocks and crawl between without getting in the mud'.
Kerkhove concludes his detailed study thus:
It would appear that the Battle of ’Narawai was not a one-sided massacre but rather a well-planned operation in which Aboriginal combatants orchestrated tactical advantages and merged strategies of traditional pullen-pullen [large inter-tribal battles] with guerrilla tactics more suited to the demands of the time. Skilful use of terrain and vegetation offered Aboriginal combatants considerable advantages over European weaponry. This has major implications for how frontier war confrontations should be viewed. From this perspective, the Battle of ’Narawai constitutes a largely unacknowledged Aboriginal victory.
Which brings us to Duckett White, a serving army officer, and his 'modern military interpretation of frontier economic warfare'. The author finds 'compelling evidence that the economic warfare, as practiced along multiple frontiers in Australia by First Nations groups, was both sophisticated and remarkably effective ...'.
Duckett White's aim is to get beyond the 'massacre or resistance' question and instead delineate First Nations military strategy and its effects. There were 'critical vulnerabilities' which could be exploited, leading to defeat. The author shows how First Nations people used 'economic warfare', targeting stock and crops to resist colonial expansion, and did so without pitched battles and mass casualties. What is known in the study of warfare as 'guerrilla, resistance, insurgency, and militia tactics' (GRIM) is still warfare.
The economic warfare pursued by First Nations people inflicted financial costs and reputational damage on colonists. Duckett White outlines the severe impacts of frontier conflict on the resources of early New South Wales, then Tasmania, Port Phillip and Queensland. He notes that 6 per cent of the 1859 Queensland Budget was allocated to the Native Police and quotes a correspondent to a Brisbane paper as late as 1887 complaining of 'the enemy we have at our door, the enemy of every day, that one that slowly but surely robs us and impoverishes us'. Farms and businesses, as well as government, suffered, with sheep and cattle herds destroyed, pastures and crops burnt, shepherds murdered, and the expansion of settlement hampered.
'First Nations resistance in many instances degraded and undermined a fledgling colonial economy ... The number of casualties and the reputational damage thereby inflicted served to slow rather than prevent colonial expansion.' Mutilated stock served as warnings and instances were widely reported such that 'newspaper readers of the time were aware that they were engaged in a war'. John Watts, Queensland MP, conceded in 1861 that 'the people of this colony must be considered to be, as they always have been, at open war with the Aborigines'.
The financial and reputational cost of First Nations warfare is only slowly being recognised despite the plethora of evidence [Duckett White concludes]. The pacification of the Sydney Basin took nearly forty years: twice the time spent by Western forces in Afghanistan and ten times the length of the Great War. That First Nations continued a tradition of warfare (economic warfare, strike force operation and "tiny wars") that pre-dates the pitched battle by millennia is remarkable ... Once alerted to the colonial perspectives, from speeches and diaries through to newspaper reports, the dismissal of First Nation’s resistance as something less than war becomes untenable.
So, we return to the remark from Henry Reynolds with which we began: war in Queensland might have lacked the 'dignity' of Waterloo, the Crimea, Gettysburg or the Somme, but it was certainly war to those who fought it and were shaped by it. As settlement spread across Queensland, the newcomers invested and consolidated and First Nations resisted and defended. That sounds like war. Lest We Forget.
Map of Queensland 1890, with the carve-up into counties indicating the extension of settlement into Indigenous Country (Wikimedia Commons; Queensland Government). See also: Queensland Historical Atlas maps on the pastoral expansion of Queensland.
* The late Ross Gibson's Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) is a compelling narrative of travelling in rural Queensland and immersion in its history. 'To travel this long, lonely road is to traverse a stretch of brutal history and to enter a gigantic crime scene. The landscape itself holds a million clues to a horror story blazing across two centuries. Winding through a haunted place that is forever frontier territory, this road is the scene of casual as well as callous murder whether from the 1970s, the 1960s or the 1860s.' (Blurb)
Picture credit: Slater's Pocket Map of the City of Brisbane, 1865 (Wikipedia/T. Ham & Co)
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