History of Australia (1788-1850) - Aboriginal Resistance

Aboriginal Resistance

See also: Australian Frontier Wars and History of Indigenous Australians

Aboriginal reactions to the sudden arrival of British settlers were varied, but often hostile when the presence of the colonisers led to competition over resources, and to the occupation by the British of Aboriginal lands. European diseases decimated Aboriginal populations, and the occupation or destruction of lands and food resources led to starvation. By contrast with New Zealand, where the Treaty of Waitangi was seen to legitimise British settlement, no treaty was signed with Aborigines, who never authorised British colonisation.

According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period:

"In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and it ally, demoralisation".

Since the 1980s, the use of the word "invasion" to describe the British colonisation of Australia has been highly controversial. According to Australian Henry Reynolds however, government officials and ordinary settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently used words such as "invasion" and "warfare" to describe their presence and relations with Indigenous Australians. In his book The Other Side of the Frontier, Reynolds described in detail armed resistance by Aboriginal people to white encroachments by means of guerilla warfare, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth.

In the early years of colonisation, David Collins, the senior legal officer in the Sydney settlement, wrote of local Aborigines:

While they entertain the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle they made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.

In 1847, Western Australian barrister E.W. Landor stated: "We have seized upon the country, and shot down the inhabitants, until the survivors have found it expedient to submit to our rule. We have acted as Julius Caesar did when he took possession of Britain." In most cases, Reynolds says, Aborigines initially resisted British presence. In a letter to the Launceston Advertiser in 1831, a settler wrote:

We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies – as invaders – as oppressors and persecutors – they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore they are not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful possessions which have been torn from them by force.

Reynolds quotes numerous writings by settlers who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, described themselves as living in fear and even in terror due to attacks by Aborigines determined to kill them or drive them off their lands. He argues that Aboriginal resistance was, in some cases at least, temporarily effective; the Aboriginal killings of men, sheep and cattle, and burning of white homes and crops, drove some settlers to ruin. Aboriginal resistance continued well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century, and in 1881 the editor of the Queenslander wrote:

During the last four or five years the human life and property destroyed by the aborigines in the North total up to a serious amount. ettlement on the land, and the development of the mineral and other resources on the country, have been in a great degree prohibited by the hostility of the blacks, which still continues with undiminished spirit.

Reynolds argues that continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the "myth" of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children. Among the most famous massacres of the early nineteenth century were the Pinjarra massacre and the Myall Creek massacre.

Famous Aborigines who resisted British colonisation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries include Pemulwuy and Yagan. In Tasmania, the "Black War" was fought in the first half of the nineteenth century.