'The Blacks are Coming' - Or Maybe Not?
As we have discussed in a previous post, Professor Henry Reynolds is the main proponent of the theory that Australia was not settled relatively peacefully. Instead, he proposes that a violent ‘Frontier War’ raged across Australia as the settlers expanded into the continent.
In one of his books, Frontier, Allen & Unwin, 1987 (1996) p12., he includes a chapter titled, “The blacks are coming”.
In this chapter, Henry Reynolds offers a number of examples of ‘evidence’ that the Aborigines formed (or at least the settlers believed they were about to be formed) large groupings or masses of warriors that threatened the early colonial settlements. If Reynolds wants us to believe that there really was a ‘Frontier War’, he needs us to believe that there is evidence that the Aboriginal and settler combatants formed up into large, opposing ‘armies’.
So, let’s test the quality of Henry Reynolds’ ‘evidence’ by selecting one of his examples, where he says the panicked colonials at Sydney Cove believed, ‘that the blacks were assembling in [a] force…the first intelligence [of which] magnified the number to two thousand…’.
Or maybe not.
The blacks are coming
Reynolds writes,
Excerpt from Fontier, by Henry Reynolds, Allen & Unwin 1987 (1996 Ed). p12
Reynolds’ source for this event is Watkin Tench’s account below. But note how Reynolds, in a very Pascoesque fashion leaves off the last part of the sentence on page 138, viz.,
‘; but upon the convicts, who were at work there , pointing their spades and shovels at them, in the manner of guns, they had fled into the woods.’
Come on, Henry. You can’t expect us to believe a ‘Frontier War’ was raging, with the setters, convicts and marines ‘shaking in their boots’ with panic at the sight of 50 Aborigines; with Aborigines so cowardly, that all a manacled convict had to do was point his shovel at them to shoo them off into the woods, without even a mention of a spear being thrown?
These clashes are at the level of the ‘petty warfare' that occurred in feuds in Sicilian villages, in clashes on the gold-fields at Eureka and Palmer River and between Arnhem Land Aborigines and the Japanese pearlers in the 1930s. To try to inflate them to a level of a Declared War between States or Nations is only a ploy in an attempt to validate the claims for Aboriginal sovereignty by modern political activists.
Excerpt from, ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales’, Captain Watkin Tench 1793, Angus And Robertson (1961), p137.
Excerpt from, ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales’, Captain Watkin Tench 1793, Angus And Robertson (1961), p138.
The relevant Notes for Watkin Tench’s account and the further references are shown below
Note 8 Further References
HRA I : p76 , p77 , p96 , p100
These references make for very interesting reading and only confirm that there was no concerted ‘Frontier War’.
The records only describe the skirmishes and clashes between the Aboriginal people and mostly the convicts. The conflicts are invariably caused by petty thefts and provocations by the convicts against the Aborigines.
So Just How Deadly Was Professor Reynolds So-called ‘Frontier War’ Compared to other Causes of Death?
In December 1788, in the infant colony at Sydney Cove, Henry Reynolds wants us to believe that, as he says, ‘The blacks are coming' and there was a ‘communal panic’ caused by the ‘belief that the Aborigines were about to combine and advance en masse, determined to kill all the Europeans or drive them away.’
In our opinion, it looks to us that Professor Reynolds is ‘just making this up’, based on no real evidence, in true Pascoesque-style. We couldn’t find anywhere that Tench or Collins recorded that the colonials felt that they were in any immediate danger of all being killed or driven away.
David Collins, the Judge-Advocate and Secretary of the Colony (1788 to 1796), produced a table of the number of deaths from between, when the First Fleet set out from England on May 13th 1787, until January 1st 1789. He records the total number of deaths to be 115, of which only 4 were attributed to those ‘massing blacks’ that Reynolds says were such a threat to the colony. If there was a raging ‘Frontier War’, where the Aborigines ‘en masse’ battled the colonists to kill them or drive them away, then one would have expected the colonist death toll by native attacks to be considerably higher than the four recorded during this period.
In our opinion, it looks to us as if Henry Reynolds is using Bruce Pascoe’s techniques of ‘exaggeration’ and ‘selective quoting’ to slant the narrative. In our opinion there were quite a number of troublesome frontier ‘clashes’ and ‘skirmishes’ at Sydney Cove during this time, but not anything that we would class as a ‘war’.
Excerpt from, ‘An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales’ by David Collins, 1798, A.H & A.W Reed publishers (1975), p41
Further Reading
Lithograph of 1866, of The proclamation board of Governor Arthur.
If the British were conducting a violent frontier ‘war’ against Aboriginal people why would they have adopted the official stance,
‘… to endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of Our Subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary Interruption in the exercise of their several occupations. It is our Will and Pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the Offence…’
- Foundation Documents page 6 : Governor Phillip’s Instructions 25 April 1787 (UK)
Why then did the British treat the Aborigines as British subjects? Can you go to ‘war’ with your own subjects?
[ps: Desciples of Henry Reynolds’ ‘Frontier War’ thesis however, do dont agree! - See Thomas Rogers with the new approved official ‘anti-British’ reasoning at our taxpayer funded Australian War Memorial.
