How many is 20,000 Aboriginal Deaths?
Ordinary people like us here at Dark Emu Exposed, are now very wary when we read the pronouncements of Professors Henry Reynolds and Bruce Pascoe.
Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, which is used as a ‘credible’ reference source by Henry Reynolds in his recent book,Truth Telling, has been thoroughly debunked recently by academia.
So now we are on our guard with what both Professors Henry Reynolds and Bruce Pascoe try to make us believe. Is what they are saying true, or are they slanting it, and using selective quotes from the literature to support their particular, political narrative?
In this Part 1 blog-post of our, Series on The Frontier Wars - Truth or Fiction?, we will look at the issue of the scale of the colonial Aboriginal killings and massacres.
Were they really as frequent and as bloody as the two Professors would have us believe?
Was there a widespread, genocidal Frontier War raging across Australia during colonial times?
There certainly were killings and some massacres of Aboriginal people. These were appalling and illegal occurrences, but we need to be very careful when we use our modern standards to pass judgement on our ancestors and their past world. The important thing for us as a moral country is to recognise and acknowledge our actions when they are wrong, and then, within the framework of our legal and political institutions, make laws and/or change our attitudes so those wrongs are stopped and not repeated again. This is the progressive way in which our country has risen to be one of the top societies in the history of the world.
The Frontier Wars?
The actual level of frontier violence during Australia’s settlement was widely debated in the early 2000’s between two historians, Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle.
Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds
- A long debate here in early 2000s - A debate at the National Press Club featuring Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds discussing frontier violence between Aboriginal and white Australians.
- A shorter Discussion on Lateline - Australian Frontier Wars: Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds on Lateline
Reynolds’ basic position was that colonial and modern Australians did not know, or did not want to know, that in fact there were very many Aboriginal people killed or massacred during the settlement of Australia. Reynolds contends that the land of Australia was not settled relatively peacefully, but instead, what occurred was a violent ‘conquest’ of Aboriginal sovereign societies.
The number of deaths, the way they were committed, and their widespread occurrence can only be described, Reynolds claims, in terms of a ‘frontier war’.
In northern Australia, Reynolds estimates the death toll to be,
‘as many as 10,000 blacks…killed in skirmishes with the Europeans in Northern Australia’ (Ref. 1 p 165) and ‘for the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20,000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers.’ (Ref 1. p99).
More recently, Reynolds has written,
‘Previous estimates of the death toll in frontier war of about 20,000 appear to be for too conservative. Detailed work on the Queensland frontier strongly suggests we need to lift the figure to at least 30,000 and even that may prove to be short of the mark’. (Ref. 2).
More recent writers and historians (and increasingly some members of the media and public) now use the word ‘genocide’ to describe the fate of Aboriginal peoples in Australia.
Although Windschuttle points out that Reynolds did not use term ‘genocide’ himself, he does charge that Reynolds’ exaggerated and unfounded death toll of 20,000, or more, for the ‘Frontier Wars’ have, in Windschuttle’s view, resulted in other writers, using less rigour and less scholarship, to promote the ‘genocide’ meme within the broader Australian, and indeed the International community, leading to an undeserving brutal image of Australia’s colonial past.
Windschuttle, on the other hand, says there is no reliable evidence for claiming these large death tolls of 10,000, 20,000 or more. While acknowledging that there were indeed killings and some massacres, of both white settlers and Aboriginal peoples, he concludes that,
‘…the British colonization of Australia was the least violent of all of Europe’s encounters with the New World. It did not meet any organised resistance. Conflict was sporadic rather than systematic. The notion of ‘frontier war’ is fictional. The claim that the colonists committed genocide is unsupported by the historical evidence.’ (Ref. 3).
Particularly, Windschuttle claims that Reynolds’ figure of 10,000 Aboriginal deaths in Queensland is nothing more than a guess based on a formula - taking an estimate of the number of settlers killed by aborigines, multiplying it by an apparently arbitrarily chosen factor of 10, and then adding an extra 20% to get the figure of 10,000. (Reference : watch here from 13:23).
Reynolds counters that he didn’t use a formula, but instead based estimates on his long experience in reading just about everything that was available regarding Aboriginal killings and frontier violence. He believes his death-toll numbers of, 10,000 for Queensland, and 20,000 for northern Australia are correct, if not indeed an understatement. Surprisingly, Reynolds has not published a simple list or tally of each of the incidences as he read them during his research, unlike many other researchers, both academic and amateur in this field (eg: Ryan, Windschuttle, Holland, Gapps).
This blog-post is the first of a series that we intend to publish exploring questions such as, how many Aborigines and settlers were killed or massacred during colonial times? What evidence is there for the death tolls claimed by various historians? Were all interactions between settlers and Aborigines violent, or did some Aborigines voluntarily elect to interact as best as they could with the new settler society? Compared to other colonies around the world, was the settlement of Australia particularly bloody? What if anything should we do, say or teach about this aspect of our history? Should we discuss blame, guilt or reparations or just move on?
How Many is 20,000 Aboriginal Deaths?
Reynolds’ Aboriginal death-toll of 20,000 from frontier violence in northern Australia does indeed sound horrifying.
However, at the risk of the macabre and appearing disrespectful, we are going to try to put this death toll into some sort of context for ourselves in the year 2021. (We in no way want to be disrespectful to the memories of the many Aboriginal and settler peoples who were killed during clashes in colonial times. Instead we see this blog-post as say, a pathologist’s report - a grizzly business that needs to be done by a pathologist who in no way can be held accountable for the circumstances in which his cadaver finds itself).
To put the deaths of say, 1,800 settlers and 20,000 Aborigines, over an 80 year period, into a modern-day context, let us look at a set of death statistics in which we as citizens, either by accident or design, and ‘the government’ are both, like Aboriginal and settler killers, complicit, namely the road death toll.
The graph below shows that Australia’s road toll from 1925 to 2004, is a truely horrifying 171,353 Australians killed, many of whom were innocent victims. This is nearly 10 times higher than the number of Aborigines that Henry Reynolds estimates were killed over about the same time period in colonial northern Australia (20,000 Aboriginal deaths). Yet, modern Australians do not, and should not, feel any guilt or delegitimisation over this awful road death toll.
Instead, Australia as a polity constantly strove to change people’s driving attitudes, legislated for safety improvements in vehicles and roads, and increased penalties for unsafe drivers, such that the road toll peaked in about 1972 and it has been in a steady decline ever since. The road toll however, is still with us today and around 6 times higher (1500 vs 250 per year) than Henry Reynolds’ estimate of the average annual Aboriginal death toll in his ‘frontier wars’.
Similarly, many settlers, missionaries and governments worked as best as they could to protect Aboriginal people and pass legislation for their protection from illegal and indiscriminent killings. Despite the appalling death toll of perhaps 20,000 Aboriginal deaths, this number is still a very small proportion of the total Aboriginal population of northern Australia - less than 10%. Disease and the loss of morale and fertility had far larger impacts on the premature deaths of Aboriginal people than did settler killings and massacres.
To keep the graph more compact, we have added the 80 years of Reynolds’ data between 1925 to 2005 and the 28 years of the Sydney wars between 1928 and 1956 - Source of Road Toll Data Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Canberra, 2005
Conclusions
We at Dark Emu Exposed do not, in our humble opinion, think that the Aboriginal death tolls presented by revisionist historians such as Henry Reynolds support the claim that the settlement of colonial Australia was particularly bloody. Undeniably, any death due to clashes between settlers and Aboriginal people is to be lamented, but in the scheme of things, Reynolds’ estimate of around 250 Aboriginal deaths per year, over a period of 80 years, is not a standout statistic.
For example, we have found statistics for the Australasian suicide rates for the 5-year periods of 1871-75 to 1896-1900 (Ref. 4 here) which, when the figures for New Zealand are removed, give an annual Australian suicide (self-destruction) rate varying from 216 to 396 deaths per year. These deaths by suicide are about the same, or a bit more, than Reynolds’ Aboriginal ‘frontier war’ death rate of an average of 250 per year.
We are not saying that Aboriginal killings by settlers is in anyway acceptable, but what we are saying is that, for the times and compared to the other ways in which Australians were being killed, these levels of Aboriginal deaths are not that high so as to suggest that the country was ‘at war’.
As for the statistics of the deaths from clashes between settlers, soldiers, convicts and Aboriginal people in the founding years of settlement at Sydney Cove - in the years 1788 to 1816 - the total death toll of 166 deaths (including both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people) over 28 years (av. 6 per year) hardly makes a blip on the graph above. To call this the Sydney ‘Wars’ would appear to us amateurs as as serious case of ‘word-creep’. The Sydney ‘Clashes’, yes; the Sydney ‘Wars’, no. (Ref 5 : Raw data here)
Aboriginal deaths in custody were around 574 over 39 years, an average of 15 per year or more than twice the rate of the so-called ‘Sydney Wars’. Does the Australian public feel they are under mobilisation and fighting this ‘Deaths in Custody War’? We don’t think so.
Our point is that, yes there were lots of Aboriginal and settler clashes that lead to a considerable number of killings and even massacres. But without a lot of compelling physical evidence to back up the claims in the historical record, it is hard for us here at Dark Emu Exposed to accept that there was a ‘genocidal frontier war’ raging across northern Australia for decades, let alone across the rest of Australia.
Even Henry Reynolds’ statistic of 250 Aboriginal deaths per year, over an 80 year period, as lamentable as it is, doesn’t seem to us to constitute a level that indicates a ‘frontier war.’
References
Reynolds, H., The Other Side of the Frontier, James Cook university 1981
Reynolds, H., INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS - Memories and Massacres- A Repost from July 10 2017 By Henry Reynolds on Jan 18, 2018 here
Windschuttle, K., The Fabrication of Australian History, Vol I, Van Dieman’s Land 1803-1847, (Macleay Press, 2002) Rear dust jacket.
Coghan, A., A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia 1899-1900, 8th issue, William Applegate Gulick, Government Printer 1900, p376
Gapps, Stephen, The Sydney Wars, Newsouth, 2018, p273ff
