The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of th... more The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia’s most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained economic success of Queensland for over half a century, and their widespread, devastating effects on Aboriginal societies across the colony, have left a complex legacy. For non-Indigenous Queenslanders, a process of obscuring the Native Mounted Police began perhaps as soon as a detachment was removed from an area, reflected today in the minimisation of the Native Mounted Police in official histories and their omission from non-Indigenous heritage lists. In contrast, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Database preserves several elements of frontier conflict and Native Mounted Police presence, giving rise to parallel state-level narratives, neither of which map directly onto local and regional memory. This highlights potential issues for formal processes of t...
This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relatio... more This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes, though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of sanctification in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the accuracies of these sources given the different time and personal scales over which they operate. Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in different parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include narratives about different sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the complex interplay of memory and forgetting, verifiable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and different classes of historical knowledge. Application of different cultural knowledge to these sources by different agents produces different accounts of the past.
The Frontier Wars in Australia were a series of conflicts carried out at different times and plac... more The Frontier Wars in Australia were a series of conflicts carried out at different times and places by various military and civilian actors between 1788 and c1938. One of the principal agents in this violence in the colony of Queensland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the paramilitary Native Mounted Police (NMP), who were tasked with protecting settlers from Aboriginal resistance. This paper examines written and oral accounts of frontier conflict between settlers, Aboriginal people and the NMP in northwest Queensland and places them into the context of the archaeological evidence from an NMP camp site. It thus emphasizes the different types of stories that arise from different sources of historical knowledge and how oral histories transformed into print interact with oral histories of subaltern peoples. Investigation of the archaeology of related sites suggests that they refer to events at a quite different scale.
The nature of historical knowledge is complex, involving oral history, archaeology and (less ofte... more The nature of historical knowledge is complex, involving oral history, archaeology and (less often than is generally supposed) wri en documents, many of which begin with some sort of oral telling. Here we outline the historical knowledge of a particular series of events in northwest Queensland (Qld) that we have recently wri en about (Davidson et al. 2020). These events began in 1879 with the killings of non-Aboriginal pastoral workers around Wonomo Waterhole on Sulieman Creek (midway between Mount Isa and Boulia). What followed is known from both wri en sources and oral accounts: many Aboriginal people were killed and others captured in reprisal raids by the Native Mounted Police (NMP) and other pastoralists. Although there were no living European witnesses to the events at Wonomo, there are multiple wri en versions of what took place at the waterhole and afterwards. Some of these were published as correspondence to the newspapers in cities more than 1500 km away in the weeks that followed the discovery of the bodies. Others were told much later (the two most influential being wri en at least 40 years after the events) as reminiscences by key people who were present in the area at the time of the murders and who participated in subsequent events. Many of these are in effect oral accounts-circulated amongst the European community and communicated either relatively quickly to the newspapers or, later, to biographers, even though they are now all regarded as "documentary sources". Although most accounts about Wonomo are classic "histories wri en by the victors," Lance Sullivan (one of the authors of this piece) also holds a detailed oral history about those events. This history had been passed down to him by his uncles Tom Sullivan and Clem Sullivan, by people who had first and secondhand knowledge of what happened. This allows for some fascinating insights into the nature of historical knowledge and how we know what we know about the past.
The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of th... more The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia’s most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained economic success of Queensland for over half a century, and their widespread, devastating effects on Aboriginal societies across the colony, have left a complex legacy. For non-Indigenous Queenslanders, a process of obscuring the Native Mounted Police began perhaps as soon as a detachment was removed from an area, reflected today in the minimisation of the Native Mounted Police in official histories and their omission from non-Indigenous heritage lists. In contrast, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Database preserves several elements of frontier conflict and Native Mounted Police presence, giving rise to parallel state-level narratives, neither of which map directly onto local and regional memory. This highlights potential issues for formal processes of t...
This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relatio... more This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes, though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of sanctification in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the accuracies of these sources given the different time and personal scales over which they operate. Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in different parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include narratives about different sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the complex interplay of memory and forgetting, verifiable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and different classes of historical knowledge. Application of different cultural knowledge to these sources by different agents produces different accounts of the past.
The Frontier Wars in Australia were a series of conflicts carried out at different times and plac... more The Frontier Wars in Australia were a series of conflicts carried out at different times and places by various military and civilian actors between 1788 and c1938. One of the principal agents in this violence in the colony of Queensland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the paramilitary Native Mounted Police (NMP), who were tasked with protecting settlers from Aboriginal resistance. This paper examines written and oral accounts of frontier conflict between settlers, Aboriginal people and the NMP in northwest Queensland and places them into the context of the archaeological evidence from an NMP camp site. It thus emphasizes the different types of stories that arise from different sources of historical knowledge and how oral histories transformed into print interact with oral histories of subaltern peoples. Investigation of the archaeology of related sites suggests that they refer to events at a quite different scale.
The nature of historical knowledge is complex, involving oral history, archaeology and (less ofte... more The nature of historical knowledge is complex, involving oral history, archaeology and (less often than is generally supposed) wri en documents, many of which begin with some sort of oral telling. Here we outline the historical knowledge of a particular series of events in northwest Queensland (Qld) that we have recently wri en about (Davidson et al. 2020). These events began in 1879 with the killings of non-Aboriginal pastoral workers around Wonomo Waterhole on Sulieman Creek (midway between Mount Isa and Boulia). What followed is known from both wri en sources and oral accounts: many Aboriginal people were killed and others captured in reprisal raids by the Native Mounted Police (NMP) and other pastoralists. Although there were no living European witnesses to the events at Wonomo, there are multiple wri en versions of what took place at the waterhole and afterwards. Some of these were published as correspondence to the newspapers in cities more than 1500 km away in the weeks that followed the discovery of the bodies. Others were told much later (the two most influential being wri en at least 40 years after the events) as reminiscences by key people who were present in the area at the time of the murders and who participated in subsequent events. Many of these are in effect oral accounts-circulated amongst the European community and communicated either relatively quickly to the newspapers or, later, to biographers, even though they are now all regarded as "documentary sources". Although most accounts about Wonomo are classic "histories wri en by the victors," Lance Sullivan (one of the authors of this piece) also holds a detailed oral history about those events. This history had been passed down to him by his uncles Tom Sullivan and Clem Sullivan, by people who had first and secondhand knowledge of what happened. This allows for some fascinating insights into the nature of historical knowledge and how we know what we know about the past.
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