Australia, Anarchist Affinity - The Platform #3 - The Forgotten War by Kieran ~ CookingFood.Org

White Australia has a Black History ---- 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.