Indigenous History

The sepia-toned photograph on the front cover of historian Richard Broome’s new book presents the reader with two young indigenous Australian boys, taken around 1900 at Ramahyuck, an ‘Aboriginal mission’. Bright-eyed, alert and pleased with themselves in white shirts, woollen vests, jackets and trousers, they appear to be wearing possum or kangaroo skin cloaks. A closer look, however, reveals that the furs draped thickly around their shoulders are not iconic cloaks, but their successful catch of tasty rabbits.

In this book, Colin Dyer draws on the writings of French explorers from ten expeditions spanning the years between 1772 and 1839. His aim is ‘to enable readers to make as close an acquaintance as possible directly with the French explorers and the Aboriginal Australians during their encounters’. He presents the material with little contextual information or analysis, maintaining that he has ‘no personal axe to grind … no thesis or argument to prove, no preconceived conclusion to impose’. This stance, as we will see, has its advantages and its limitations.

On the afternoon of Tuesday 23 December 1958, all work in the remote South Australian coastal towns of Thevenard and Ceduna came to a halt for the funeral of nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam, who on the previous Saturday afternoon had been violently raped and then bashed to death in a little cave on the beach between the two towns. On the morning of her funeral, a 27-year-old Arrernte man called Rupert Max Stuart had been formally charged with her murder: he had arrived in Ceduna with a small travelling funfair on the night before her death. He spent Christmas Day in Adelaide Gaol, penniless, illiterate and terrified. How the Hattam family spent Christmas Day can scarcely be imagined.

In the aftermath of the ideological jousts between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle about the level of violence on the colonial frontier, a new book has appeared that tackles the issue from a fresh perspective. The author, John Connor, is a military historian. In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, he uses the methods of military history to examine the weapons, tactics and conduct of warfare on the Australian frontier during the first fifty years of British colonisation. Connor emerges from the fray with exciting new findings.

Last year I took my twelve-year-old daughter to see Lake Mungo. We talked all morning about ancient lakes and Aboriginal camp sites but looking at the saltbush she could not make the jump. Standing on the lunette, her keen eyes picked out a tiny crenulated piece of bone amongst the drift sand. Less than ten millimetres long it was a fish otolith, part of the bony structure of the inner ear, its shape characteristic of golden perch. Puzzled she looked around at the dry plain and started to ask, ‘How did a fish get way out here?’. Watching her eyes, I saw the flash of understanding: an ancient lake full of water snapped into focus. The tiny otolith was tangible evidence of past environments no book could match. But to grasp the past imaginatively and intellectually you need to visit the sites and learn to read the landscapes. This is part of the reason I like the latest edition of The Riches of Ancient Australia, Josephine Flood’s field guide to prehistoric Australia. It encourages people to get out and look around.