An eight-year long project to map the massacres of people on the Australian frontier is the “first sustained effort to break the code of silence” on the violence of colonisation, its lead researcher says, but the full story is yet to be told.
The true picture may never be known because “the code of silence about massacres has been universal”, according to emeritus Prof Lyndall Ryan from the University of Newcastle’s frontier massacres research project.
“[The map] is not definitive, because so many massacres were hidden and people have never talked about them, but this is the first time we have a national map that has a clear method of investigation,” Ryan says.
“This is just what we’ve found so far. It’s a first serious look on a national scale, and I think it will just provide the opportunity for other researchers, whoever they might be, to look further.”
A seasoned historian who has researched and written about the violent colonial history of Tasmania and Victoria, Ryan says she was “astonished” by the extent of frontier massacres across Australia.
“I really did not expect to find the numbers that we have found. And we know that the numbers we have found are simply indicative, rather than definitive.”
She says there are many other sites of conflict that are not on the map.
“We’ve come across stories and incidents that have a lot of substance, but simply don’t meet the criteria at the moment.”
The criterion is her decision to include on the map sites only cases where a minimum of six people were killed, known in global genocide studies as a “fractal massacre”.
“We had to stick with six, because we wanted to keep it relevant to the international literature, and the international work on massacre generally,” she says. “The killing of any person in this way is a shocking crime. There is no question about that.
“But massacre has a particular meaning and implication. It’s a mass killing. It’s planned, it’s deliberate and it has great consequences for the community who survive. Many communities don’t survive a frontier massacre, it has a terrible impact.”
Ryan concedes this made the work more difficult and was a source of criticism. She says future research on incidents where fewer than six people were killed is essential, particularly in Queensland, where such cases were extremely common.
“Certainly, my historian colleagues in Queensland have been very anxious to say, your map of Queensland is not giving us a clear picture of really what was going on, where you’ve got small numbers of people on both sides, say three to five people being killed by Aboriginal people, and white people killing three to five Aboriginal people. And that, for many Queensland historians, is what the story of the frontier war in Queensland is all about.
“I’m taking a national approach. And I still think that Queensland comes out with the greatest number of massacres of any part of Australia, marginally more than the NT, and I’ve been shocked by what we’ve found in the Northern Territory.”
The research team has received more than 700 messages over the past eight years, providing feedback and, occasionally, crucial family archives that contain proof of massacres.
“People have contacted us over the last eight years with information or querying what we’ve done, or suggesting that we’ve missed out on important information, providing more information so in a way we’ve all been learning about how to research frontier massacres, and how to get the data as accurate as possible.”
“I think it’s been a national learning project, in a way.”
The Killing Times is based on data from the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project led by Prof Lyndall Ryan at the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the 21st Century Humanities.
For more information about the analysis conducted by Guardian Australia and the research methods of the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacres research team, please read the “About” section here.
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