There is a common misconception abroad amongst some Australians that the historical recounting of the tragic loss of life amongst Indigenous people in the colonisation of this land is intended to make Australians feel guilty. Given our Western culture’s preoccupation with self individualism, that notion comes readily to hand. But it is quite misleading.
Generally speaking historians record the disproportionate loss of life to give us a wider and deeper awareness and understanding of our history.
If one is to choose a ‘G word’ I would recommend the word “grief”. Grieving was not absent from Indigenous experience in the encroaching European possession and settlement of this land. Two excerpts on our website give expression to that grief.
Resident Magistrate and Protector Edward Eyre, in the report of his first assessing expedition, “undertaken in January 1842, provides a fairly clear insight as to why the district was quiet. He estimated that there were approximately 700 Aboriginal people between his post at Moorundie and the Rufus, and of that number he believed that no more than 200 were ‘grown up men’. [1]
While in the neighbourhood of the Rufus, I observed many women in deep mourning for their husbands, who had been shot in some of the conflicts with the Europeans. Many children were pointed out to me as being fatherless from the same cause, and I have no doubt that loss of lives in these districts has been considerable from such affrays. [2]
Forty-six years later, in April 1888, in Western Australia, a participant in a raiding party that killed a number of Indigenous people (including a boy who had climbed up a tree whom they shot dead) recounted that “During the night we heard…the women crying all night…” [3]
An ingredient in grief is often the assessment – “This should never have happened”. This is particularly so when grief is catalysed by humans’ callous treatment of fellow-humans.
Franciscan Richard Rohr reflecting on the experience of ‘grief’ writes:
Many of us have been taught that grief and sadness are something to repress, deny or avoid…the experience of grief is different than the fixing, explaining, or controlling mode. It is the experience of feeling the tragedy of things, the sadness of things.
Public expression of grief is not absent from our national life. It is contained within the varied strands of remembrance on each Anzac Day.
I have written earlier of the absence of public rituals or remembrances of the cost in Indigenous lives that Australia’s “homeland wars” entailed. Natalie Avalos, an American Apache woman and scholar, notes the multi-layered realities that are brought from past times into the present.
She writes of the experience of Native American people in an article entitled What Does It Mean to Heal From Historical Trauma? But her words are pertinent to much wider Indigenous communities:
Native American peoples’ health is impacted by structural legacies of settler colonialism, including land dispossession, racism and poverty. Responding with care to individuals and communities experiencing past and present traumatic stress, from genocide and deeply entrenched structural violence means navigating ongoing grief, restoring self-community and human ecological relationships, and generating cultural vibrancy. [4]
On the subject of commemoration, I was struck by an experience that I had recently. I attended a musical performance by a trio of very gifted musicians – a pianist, a cellist and a violinist. [5] Their music took me into primal depths of consciousness. I am a ‘words’ person, but the music that day took me into deeper territory than words can go.
And I thought of Anzac Day and the primal sound of the ‘last post’ being played on a bugle. For me, another instrument whose sound takes me into the primal depths of our history is a didgeridoo. Its music also contains haunting sounds. And had European dominance been pushed to its seeming inevitable total consequence, that instrument would have been silenced in this land.
Will we see a day when the didgeridoo, too, is played on Anzac Day, or on a quite separate commensurate national day, to give Indigenous expression to the grief contained within the events of Australia’s own history? For the past times lead into present times.
1. Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 38-39, 193 n.88. Cited as an
excerpt for 17 January on So That We Remember.
2. Eyre to Colonial Secretary, 10 January 1842. PRSA, p. 308.
3. Chris Owen, Every Mother’s Son Is Guilty”, p.239, 540 n.97. Cited as an excerpt for 11 September on
So That We Remember.
4. Natalie Avalos, “What Does It Mean to Heal From Historical Trauma?” in AMA Journal of Ethics,
Medicine and Society, June, 2021.
5. I was reminded of John Shaw Nielsen’s line in his poem about “…grief’s call in a violin”.
From the So That We Remember Newsletter – July, 2024
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