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Title: The Forgotten War
Author: Anarchist Affinity
Date: November 9, 2014
Language: en
Topics: Australia, colonialism, history
Source: Retrieved on March 11, 2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/20210311124501/http://www.collectiveaction.org.au/2014/11/09/the-forgotten-war/
Notes: By Kieran. Published in The Platform Issue 3 — Spring 2014.

Anarchist Affinity

The Forgotten War

The First World War is the war the Australian ruling class wants us to

remember. They are spending hundreds of millions over the next two years

making sure we never forget. It’s the war they would have us believe

created Australia. And Australia was created in a war. But it was

another war. A war our rulers would rather pretend never occurred.

Australia began with an invasion. In 1788 nearly eight hundred convicted

criminals and nearly four hundred military personnel landed in Sydney.

They began construction of an advance base of operations, and kicked off

a war of conquest that would span 140 years.

When the invasion commenced there were at approximately 750,000 people

living in 350 distinct nations on the Australian landmass. By 1900, only

93,200 first Australians survived. At least twenty thousand Aboriginal

people were killed or murdered in untold battles and massacres from

Hobart to the Kimberley. Approximately two and half thousand white

invaders were killed as Aboriginal people resisted extermination.

The heroes of Aboriginal armed resistance are not remembered. The

Australian War Memorial refuses to acknowledge their struggle as a

“war”. In legislation, the Australian War Memorial is established to

commemorate “wars and war-like operations in which Australians have been

on active service” which includes “any military force of the ground

raised in Australia”. Presumably, then, the following people do not

exist.

Windradyne

In January 1824 the Wirudjuri people under the leadership of Windradyne

embarked on an ambitious guerrilla war to roll back the expanding white

settlement of Bathurst. Over eleven months the Wirudjuri burnt out

stations, dispersed sheep and cattle and killed settlers. By August the

Sydney Gazette stated that the Wirudjuri had exposed “the strength and

wealth of the Colony… to destruction”. New South Wales Governor Thomas

Brisbane declared martial law in the Bathurst area, regular soldiers

were dispatched from Sydney, and by December a series of massacres had

claimed the lives of over one thousand Wirudjuri men, women and

children.

Yagan

In 1829 white invaders established a colony at Swan River in what is now

Western Australia. Noongar people first attempted to isolate and avoid

these settlers, but a series of murders by white settlers in December

1831 eventually led to an armed response by Noongar warriors. Initially

warriors under the leadership of Yagan and Midgegooroo responded to the

depredations with acts of traditional retribution (spearing), however as

white violence escalated Yagan in particular pursued an armed campaign

against the settlement. Crops and buildings were burned, livestock was

scattered, and an ambitious series of robberies was conducted. Yagan’s

interactions with white settlers were not always hostile, and he was

eventually killed by two shepherds he had befriended. They shot him, and

cut off his head to claim a reward offered by the colonial government.

Yagan’s head was pickled and taken to England to be publically

displayed.

Jandamarra

By 1890 white settlers were colonising the Kimberley region. Jundamurra

was a Bunuba man employed as a tracker in the service of the white

Police. In 1894 he was deployed against his own people. Jundamurra

rebelled. He killed liberated prisoners, seized weapons, and commenced a

three year guerrilla war against white settlers, soldiers and police.

Eventually his band was tracked down, and Jundamurra was captured and

killed. Like many other black resistance fighters, he was beheaded and

his remains were put on public display in England.

Jandamarra, Yagan and Windradyne are but three of the names that have

(barely) survived a deliberate campaign of forgetting and denial. The

vast majority of black resistance fighters were simply murdered and

forgotten, with their actions dismissively explained away.

The Australian ruling class wish to minimise, and forget black

resistance and white atrocities because remembering has important

political consequences.

The acts and history of resistance demonstrate the reality that this

continent’s original peoples never ceded their right to

self-determination. Far from surrendering or fading away in the mists of

time, Aboriginal peoples fought tooth and nail to defend their lands,

laws and people.

This war of conquest and resistance was economic as well as genocidal.

Cattle and sheep were crucial to the first capitalist accumulation and

extraction on this continent, and Aboriginal resistance often focused on

economic warfare against these interests – the dispersal or spearing of

herds and the burning of farms and crops. The white response to economic

warfare was genocide, with the burning or a crop or death of a single

white settler met with wholesale massacres. It is no coincidence that

massacres follow the cattle from Gippsland and the mass murder of Gunai

in the 1840s to Coniston and the massacres of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre

and Kaytetye peoples in 1929.

To recognise this is to recognise something about the system of land

ownership in White Australia. Every plot of land, every house, factory

and cattle farm, is built upon the murder and destruction of Aboriginal

peoples. There are reasons the Australian ruling class would rather

forget the frontier wars and remember Gallipoli, but no matter what they

might say, it was the war of conquest unleashed in 1788 is the war that

created Australia.

The invasion and conquest of this continent created the Australian

state, as colonial administrations were erected and then consolidated.

The invasion and conquest laid the basis for the first cycle of

capitalist accumulation to occur in Australia, as agriculture and mining

extracted wealth from stolen lands. And it is the invasion and conquest

that created the Australian working class, as hundreds of thousands were

transported or enticed with the promise of stolen land.

Anarchist Affinity

The Forgotten War

Windradyne

Yagan

Jandamarra

Further Reading and Resources: