Frontier or History Wars?

Why is it difficult to assess the nature and extent of Aboriginal resistance?

For this response I have used the Henry Reynolds article Aboriginal- European Contact History: Problems and Issues.

The nature and extent of Aboriginal resistance to the settling of Australia is difficult to assess. There are many reasons that the Aboriginals have been marginalised in the pages of history, and this in turn impacts upon how their ‘resistance’ is interpreted. According to Reynolds, Hancock had published the most popular historical view of the Aborigines at the time of settlement in the 1930s; they were typified as helpless in the face of European settles. And later, Reynolds claims, the opinion was that Aboriginal resistance had been so ‘weak’ that settlers had walked into the Australian interior barely armed. The most common opinion was that Aboriginals posed little or no threat to settlers of Australian, and for the most part, any massacres that may have occurred have been unacknowledged by society.
However, the truth of Aboriginal resistance is difficult to access because Australian history, for the large part, has been one-sided. Aboriginal accounts of events that have been passed down orally are not considered to be reliable, and accounts taken contemporaneously with events that may or may not have been construed as resistance, were taken by Europeans, who were in turn able to bias those written accounts in any way. Furthermore, the nature of resistance by the Aboriginals is ambivalent as there are a number of issues that must be taken into consideration. Reynolds makes the point that while the Aborigines may have been unhappy with settlers taking over the land, their acts of violence towards Europeans may have been the results of trespass into sacred Aboriginal grounds. Alternatively, acts that had been traditional to the Aborigines, for instance the burning of large tracts of land, may have been interpreted as acts of violence, where no hostilities were actually intended.
Moreover, as Reynolds suggests, once the European’s had settled, and Aboriginals had begun to come into ‘sustained contact’ with them, the Aborigines “tended to try and incorporate the newcomers into their system of kinship, expecting as a result a share of the material abundance” (p. 57). When they took livestock and apparently stole supplies, they were realistically taking what they assumed was owed. The records and accounts of these occurrences label them as “manifestations of concerted resistance”, when realistically these events were misunderstood and misconstrued. Massacres did occur, there can be no doubt about that, but the motivations behind the attacks of aboriginals upon Europeans, and the nature of resistance against settlements may have actually differed from the accounts that were taken at the time.


Above/Left: [print: wood engraving] May 18, 1864; 'Natives Attacking Shepards' Hut'. This image is a negative depiction of Aboriginal Australians during a later period of settlement, that was published in the illustrated Melbourne Post. This portrayal suggests that Aboriginals were unneccessarily violent, and frequently attacked Europeans. There is no suggestion that there is any consideration of the reasons behind the attack, if it ever occured.

Image source: http://pictures.slv.vic.gov.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=4265