The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 13: Issue 10; 12th November, 2023 : ‘Killing for Country’ by David Marr

Regarding ‘Killing For Country: A Family Story’, by David  Marr, published in 2023 by Black Inc; 468 pages

First published in 1991, David Marr’s massive biography of Australia’s Nobel Prize winning author, Patrick White [over 727 pages] was a fascinating if not time-consuming read. Marr’s written much since then, but I think in 2023, he has exceeded all previous achievements with his latest contribution.

That publication, titled “Killing For Country: A Family Story”, is a book which I believe every Australian should read, but which Marr himself suggested in a recent TV interview, that if you don’t want to hear about what our ancestors did to the Aboriginal people of Australia in the colonial period of the 1800’s and beyond, then ‘don’t read my book’!! If that concerns you, perhaps don’t read any further here, either!

As Richard King wrote in a recent edition of the ‘Weekend Australian’, the book, while “Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could hope to find on the shelves….Marr brings the same forensic approach to this narrative of the frontier wars as he did to his celebrated biography of Patrick White, to his monographs of Tony Abbott and George Pell, and to his indispensable account of the Tampa/Children Overboard affair and Pacific Solution, Dark Victory. It is a magnificent achievement, and a necessary intervention on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native people”.

It’s also a book with a very personal taste to it. Prior to and during his research and writing ‘David Marr was shocked to discover that some of his own forebears served with the brutal Native Police during the bloodiest years on the frontier, hence the sub-title of a family story!

This contribution aims to include some ‘quotations’ from the book [most of which are tragic and heart-rending] as examples of many of the instances the writer refers to.  Initially however, allow me to quote David Marr’s own thoughts, as they appear in his closing chapter. The book arose partially from the discovery that his great grandmother’s father served with the Native Police, and he and his contemporaries’ figure prominently throughout the story, little of it favourably.  Marr’s words are worth reflecting upon because quite likely there are many Australian families of today’s generations, whose ancestral backgrounds go back to those times and people, but the stories associated with those connections, have not been passed down through the family generations since, perhaps for obvious reasons!!

From pages 408-409, as Marr writes

“We can be proud of our families for things done generations ago. We can also be ashamed. I feel no guilt for what Reg did. But I can’t argue away the shame that overcame me when I first saw that photograph of Sub-Inspector Uhr in his pompous uniform. I checked with Wikipedia. The Native Police were exactly who I thought they were. Wikipedia even had thumbnail accounts of Reg’s and D’arcy’s massacres. I pulled from my shelves everything I had on the frontier wars. The brothers were there but I hadn’t made the connection. It embarrasses me now to have been reporting race and politics in this country for so long without it ever crossing my mind that my family might have played a part in the frontier wars. My blindness was so Australian.

There are many of us descendants of the Native Police. The 442 officers and 927 troopers who served in its ranks over half a century bred many hundreds of families. Because I made no secret of what I was writing over the last few years, people have told me of their own murdering ancestors. Some were in the Native Police. Others were squatters. One was a magistrate. The great-great-grandfather of a colleague of mine poisoned two dozen men and women on the Clarence River in New South Wales in the 1840s. She will tell that story one day. [Poisoning became a cheaper option than expending time and money on bullets!! Groups of Aboriginals would be invited to share a meal, which included flour laced with arsenic!].

I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by storytelling. But I wasn’t wallowing in my own shame. None of us are free of this past. James Boyce told me: ‘Men like D’arcy become a part of the story that we are ALL implicated in. His deeds are our responsibility, his legacy belongs to us all’. My links to the Uhr brothers made the obligation to come to grips with this past personal. For a man of my trade, the outcome was obvious – I had to write their story.

What began as an account of the bloody exploits of the brothers turned into a history of an invasion in which they were foot soldiers. I was drawn into the worlds of sheep, money, merchants, the press, the church, the law and London’s imperial cowardice. I was intrigued by the shadowy forms of today’s politics emerging from the frontier wars – particularly the still potent belief in many quarters that the Aboriginal people deserve nothing for the continent they lost. Polls show hostility is strongest where most blood was shed [Queensland]. Despising those we have wronged is another way we humans have of dealing with our shame.

But these investigations always led me back to the killings and unaccountable victims from Maryborough [Qld] to the Cape, across the Gulf, into the Territory and down to the West Australian goldfields. There were days at my desk I was ambushed by dread and disgust. I tried as best I could to stick to the promise I made myself at the start – no excuses.”

In a review of Marr’s book, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 4^th October, Frank Bongiorno [Professor of History at the Australian National University] notes that in reading the book, he “was sometimes reminded of Robert Hughes’ study of convict transportation, The Fatal Shore (1987), in the epic quality of this book. And as Marr occasionally reminds us, he is traversing some of the territory also travelled by Judith Wright, in her admired family histories of colonisation. Like that great poet’s writing last century, which contributed to the reappraisal of the darker aspects of Australia’s history, Killing For Country is a timely exercise in truth-telling amid a disturbing resurgence of denialism’.

That review by Bongiorno is worth highlighting in full, as it provides an excellent synopsis of Marr’s story-telling.

As Bongiorno writes:

“In the early years of this century, Keith Windschuttle produced two volumes of a projected trilogy, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which became central to the history wars of the era. The first, published in 2002, purported to show that the colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was a relatively peaceful affair. The numbers killed in frontier violence, he argued, were far fewer than historians had claimed. Volume three in the trilogy claimed to demonstrate that the Stolen Generations were a myth. Oddly, no volume two has ever appeared. As a result, we have never been allowed to see how Windschuttle might go about proving that the notorious Queensland frontier, or, for that matter, the blood-soaked estates of the other mainland colonies, were tranquil places where God-fearing colonists attached to British law and order established their sheepwalks and cattle runs without much bloodshed.

David Marr’s powerful Killing For Country: A Family Story might help explain, as well as to fill, this apparent gap. Marr’s account is a relentless exposé of the violence at the heart of the colonisation of Australia. It is also something of a family saga: Marr is a descendant of the migrants on which the book focuses, the Uhr family.

Their Australian career unfolded mainly under the patronage of a sticky-fingered emigrant merchant, pastoralist, politician and philanthropist, Richard Jones. Jones engaged a brother-in-law, Edmund Uhr, in helping him to expand his pastoral holdings. With ambition that well and truly outstripped his ability, Uhr later ran – badly – a sheep boiling-down works in Maryborough, served as a magistrate, and ended up as Sergeant-at-Arms of the Queensland Parliament.

Killing Aboriginal people became a family business when Reg, Edmund’s son, established a career as an officer in the Native Mounted Police. Younger brother D’arcy, also in this force for a time, and rather more wild and more famous, was celebrated as a cheeky and hard-living larrikin of the type Australians are said to love. A compulsive liar, aggressive racist and serial killer, he was responsible over many decades for murders of Indigenous people in Queensland’s Gulf country, the Northern Territory, and the Western Australian goldfields.

Land-grabbing and its corollary, the massacre of Indigenous people, provided the unifying theme of this family’s early history. There must be many Australians who have such stories in their genealogy. They, like the rest of us who have inherited this history, will recently have heard from Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that, far from having suffered from colonisation, Indigenous people have it to thank for benefits such as running water. Those being killed in their tens of thousands in frontier warfare would not have been aware of such advantages, even if they had been invited to consider them before they were shot.

Marr shows that colonists evolved a discreet system for clearing Aboriginal people from their land through slaughter without incurring serious risk of interference by the authorities. Indeed, the vague instructions issued by British-appointed governors and, later, elected colonial governments about what was and was not permissible gave something close to carte blanche to white vigilantes and Aboriginal “police” charged with keeping order.

The latter were usually recruited from distant places such as the southern colonies, so that they would be as foreign to the Aboriginal people of Queensland as the white colonisers who had hired them. The violence was often extreme and fuelled by the “spoils” that the Native Police, in essence a military force, gained from their efforts, such as access to women.David Marr has uncovered a huge amount of evidence. The recruitment of other Aboriginal men to do this dirty work also gave white officers an alibi should the killing be questioned by their superiors. They could allow the Aboriginal men under their command to kill freely in the bush and then obfuscate about what had gone on. That killing did not only happen in the backblocks: Marr details a chilling massacre in the town of Maryborough itself, in plain sight of residents. There was, as usual, no punishment for the perpetrators.

Marr suggests that after the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, that saw the execution of some of the killers of Aboriginal women and children, colonists adapted. Some turned to poisoning, which would be nearly impossible to trace and punish. Colonists also became more discreet, establishing what Marr calls “a curious but brutally effective omertá … a code that let so much be written in the papers about massacres but saw nothing done about them in the courts”.

“Dispersal” was a favourite euphemism, but colonial scribes were masters of evasion. It is chilling to read the offhand way a contemporary could refer to police having “inflicted punishment on the savages in the usual manner.”

Marr has uncovered a vast array of evidence of this killing in a monumental research effort. He has made excellent use of the richness of colonial newspapers, now accessible via the National Library of Australia’s superb Trove database. These are often surprisingly revealing of frontier violence. Marr’s archival research is also deep, and he has been assiduous in working with family and local researchers, as well as historical societies and regional archives. He is familiar with all the major historical and archaeological research. It is a fabulous feat of scholarship.  This evidence is brought to life by one of the country’s most accomplished non-fiction writers” [Frank Bongiorno, 4^th October 2023]

Finally, a selection of quotations from the book, which only give a very partial indication of the research and investigations that Marr put into the writing of it.

• [1] from page 126:  “On board the Shamrock’  with Uhr was Colin Mackenzie of Kilcoy, one of the lairds of the upper Brisbane Valley.  A week after he disembarked, at least fifty Aboriginal people were poisoned on his run. The deaths of two shepherds and the spearing of a bullock had provoked the Mackenzies’ supervisor to ask: ‘Don’t you think it would be a good thing to give these fellows a dose?’. When blacks next gathered asking for flour, tobacco and sugar, a meal of maize porridge – or perhaps stewed mutton – mixed with arsenic – was given to them.  Back at their camp on the lagoon, the poison soon took effect……In the grim history of frontier slaughter in Australia, the Kilcoy poisoning of 1842 carries a unique stench. Blacks thereabouts came to call poison Mackenzie. Bloody as the fighting had been at Moreton Bay, it grew even bloodier. The Kilcoy killings set off a war that lasted many years. Yet no one was ever punished for this crime. It was barely investigated”.
• [2] from page 131: “The preferred squatter strategy was to attack their sleeping camps at dawn. It didn’t matter that in the barely lit confusion of horses, bodies and guns it was impossible to identify the men the vigilantes were pursuing. Nor did it give them pause that only after the sun came up could they hunt for some shred of evidence – a shirt, a tomahawk, a book or a side of beef – to justify the attack”.
• [3] from page 192:  “Transportation was again at the centre of contention, with squatters demonised everywhere for polluting a pure young nation – not by slaughtering the original inhabitants, but by importing British prisoners to mind their sheep”.
• [4] from page 202:  “The squatters knew…who was guilty of murdering their shepherds and stealing their sheep. But the courts asked for proof. What was the point of tracking down malefactors, taking them to a lock-up, turning up art a trial to give evidence against them only to have a judge acquit them for want of witnesses to their crime? Justice was surely more efficiently delivered in the bush with a gun”.
• [5] from page 222 -23:  “ Not content with scouring the scrubs and forest country they were bold enough to ride up to the Head statins and shoot down the tame blacks whom they found camping there….the party in scouring the bush perceived an old blind blackfellow whom they immediately fired [upon]…this old man had been for a long time a harmless hanger on at the different head stations and of course could have been in no Way identified with the [sought after] murderers”…… “Where, he asked, were the magistrates of Maryborough”.  ‘I reply our magistrates are all here and they might as well be at Jericho they do not care a fig for either law or justice and in short knowing how matters stand they are as guilty of every act of cruelty as the actual perpetuators of them. They are traitors every man of them and unworthy the confidence of the people’”.
• [6] from page 271:  Reg [Uhr] spent three of the next four years clearing the Biri, Yangga, Miyan and Yilba people from the hinterland of Bowen. The squatters wanted an empty landscape for sheep to graze. It was an article of faith with them…that peace was only possible if the blacks were gone. From time to time, squatters were reminded that the terms of their leases guaranteed the right of the first inhabitants of the country to continue hunting and fishing on their land. This was ignored. Already it was been taken for granted in Australia that the men of the bush could decide which laws applied to them. Stockmen and shepherds were armed and put to the task. So were the Native Police”.
• [7] from page 298: “The Native Police  was a reckless force, and its only effect was the extirpation of the blacks. He admitted that when blacks committed crimes they ought to be punished, and there was only one way of punishing them, namely, shooting them down”.
• [8] from page 311, spelling, etc, as originally written: Isaac Watson, a resident of the Gulf, complained to the Colonial Secretary in 1880, as follows [and as was customary at the time, nothing was done about the complaint, other than squatters complaining about do-gooders]. He wrote: “It has been customary for several years past and also up to the present time for the Sub Inspectors [the white officers in charge] and their troopers to go into the Bush round up the Blacks and shoot them indiscriminately and Kidnap the Gins and little Boys and take by force either to stations or to the township of Normanton and their made slaves of and if any attempt to escape is made they are shot down like wild beast…I think therefore it is quite time to put an end to such disgraceful proceedings”.
• [9] from page 314 [a slur on Queensland’s history] – despite attempts by some at the time to see those guilty of massacres etc of the native populations, the general tone of response was “I don’t think there is any means of punishing  these men…The obvious solution to the problem – legislation in the Queensland parliament, enforced by the colonial authorities – never happened. Despite the lives ruined and blood spilt, slavery and kidnapping were everywhere and officially tolerated in Queensland”,
• [10] from page 322-323: ‘D’arcy then took his men down to Urilla to avenge the death of two shepherds’ – as reported in the Brisbane Courier at the time: “Mr Uhr went off immediately in that direction, and his success I hear was complete. One mob of fourteen he rounded up; another mob of nine, and a last mob of eight, he succeeded with his troopers in shooting. In the latter lot was one black who would not die after receiving eighteen or twenty bullets, but a trooper speedily put an end to his existence by smashing his skull. Everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the native police, and thank Mr Uhr for his energy in ridding the district of fifty-nine myalls”.

[NB, if you read that quote outside of the context of the book, you might think the newspaper was writing about the ridding of a group of feral animals, such was the broad attitude of the European populace of the time urged on by the squatter class, and ignored by those in authority and the powers that be back in the ‘old country’!!].

• [11] from page 325: “Lieutenants Uhr and Murray, two first-class officers, were quickly at the scene of the murder and after running the tracks of the blacks with their troopers, came upon the camp, where the police found sundry articles  of Mr Clarke’s clothing, and inflicted punishment  on the savages in the usual manner”.
• From page 336 [adverse reaction back in Britain] – “When a man because his skin happens to be black can with impunity be shot dead with a rifle for an offence punished with a few weeks’ imprisonment when committed by a European, civilisation has evidently sunk  to a very low degree in the individual guilty of such a deed.  But when armed men in the government employ surround and shoot down scores of unarmed and defenceless wretches, for the pettiest of larcenies, the crime become national and affects the character of the entire population”.

And finally, though far the complete story;

• From page 378:  Senior officials, police and civilians, knew what was happening and they did nothing:  “Despite this knowledge, the native police, particularly in central Australia, operated with only minimal controls. Police records were brief and sometimes written up from memory. The native police were brutal and operated outside the law when they wantonly killed other Aboriginal people. Police violence was at the extreme coercive end of the violence continuum and remained there until the native police were disbanded”.

Those very isolated selected passages will either encourage the reader to seek out the full story as told by David Marr, or alternatively, convince he or she to ignore the whole thing, and like many of Australians, even today, turn a blind eye and pretend none if these events happened. But as research of history is continuing to prove the authenticity of this disgraceful aspect of this country’s development since 1788, the truth continues to be ignored at all our peril!!

[Bill Kirk]