“I was appalled and curious,” Marr recounted when I asked him how he began his more recent book. “I have been writing about the politics of race all my career. I know what side I’m on.”
Marr had just come across a photograph of his relative Reginald Uhr, and his brother Darcy, in the uniform of the Queensland native police. Killing for Country, the result, is a narrative history tracing Marr’s family’s participation in the state ordered mass murder of Indigenous Australians in Queensland.
The reality of the Frontier Wars has been a part of Australian historiography for almost fifty years. Starting with The Other Side of the Frontier in 1981, historians like Henry Reynolds have comprehensively documented the violent way white squatters murdered and dispossessed Indigenous people with the systematic support of state governments.
However, as Marr’s experience highlights, most Australians —- even those intimately involved with the debates around reconciliation —- have never grappled with their own links to that violence.
“A report of mine for Four Corners all those years ago was one of the provocations for the Royal Commission to deaths in custody. That didn’t even make me decide I needed to look into my family’s background, until this happened.”
Compared to the United States, where celebrities discuss their families involvement in the slave trade on live TV, Australians remain largely detached from the narrative of colonisation even if they acknowledge its impacts.
Marr argues that this is largely an education problem. “Very few young people are actually studying Australian history at senior levels.” He got visibly annoyed when I told him my senior history class dismissed studies of the Frontier Wars or Convict Women in favour of the Crusades..
Because the history we are taught — the arrival of Captain Cook, the Eureka Stockade, and Australians’ involvement in the World Wars — is largely a fiction, Marr said, it becomes inherently boring and easy to become cynical about. “In history, the only thing that’s really exciting is the truth.”
Killing for Country challenges two dominant views that mask frontier violence. First, that the evidence is insufficient to diagnose something systematic, and second: that people were acting in a way consistent with their context.
Conservative historians like Keith Windschuttle often depend on the ‘official’ policies of the British to argue that violence against Indigenous people was not sanctioned by the state. Governors would send orders from London to ‘share the land’ and treat First Nations people as British subjects.
These sources, Marr argues, are irrelevant. “Revenge killings on a huge scale were documented in every town newspaper. Violations of British law were ignored. It was just never enforced.” Studying the squatters and landowners the Uhrs killed for reveals that any other outcome was unthinkable. Lancelot Threlkeld, an English missionary based in New South Wales, put it succinctly when he said, “No man, who comes to this Colony and has ground and cattle and Corn, can dispassionately view the subject of the Indigenous people, their interest says annihilate the race.”
Despite what Windschuttle and others argue, violence at a systematic level was required for the economic growth of the colony to be sustained. That economic motivation is reflected in how the Native Police operated. “There’s a lot of autonomy within individual bands,” Marr explained. When land owners felt threatened by local nations or wanted to expand their stations, the Native Police were contracted out as a paramilitary force.
When writing the book, many family members expressed the sentiment that Marr’s argument was somehow anachronistic. One Uhr who assisted in the research told Marr that “to bring twenty-first-century thinking to the Queensland frontier is a great mistake. We were different then.”
Even though, as Marr told me, “everybody accepted colonisation was inevitable,” he counted, “there were real disputes around the methods.” Calling the times different absolves people of responsibility and does a disservice to genuine debates which took place at the time over frontier violence.
Looking at the individual motivations of Reginald and Darcy, it becomes much more complex than just a desire to kill. “This was a government job,” Marr explained. “Everybody wanted a job in the government because it was guaranteed money. They were hard to get. These two boys got these jobs, terribly young, late teens, early 20s.”
Whether the Uhrs has a desire for bloodlust or just thought this was an important job in the colony does not change the murders but points to something more sinister, that you did not need to be evil to opt into a system of genocide, you just had to take a job.
Many squatters did resist the Native Police, evidence for Marr that “people knew it was murder then just like we know it’s murder now.” The most prominent example is the story of Charles and Henry Dutton, the ancestors of the current Federal opposition leader. The Dutton’s often sheltered Indigenous people from Native Police bands, sometimes staring down policemen from their veranda with their own guns drawn.
When one of the Indigenous people working on their station asked Charles why he was being targeted, he responded: “The conduct of the Native Police was characterised by the grossest cruelty, the most oppressive and exasperating acts, inspiring a feeling of hatred, and desire of revenge.”
Resistance to the extreme acts of the Native Police forced an inquiry to be called in 1861 to investigate “charges of unnecessary cruelty brought against their officers when dealing with the Natives.” The inquiry was led by squatters, and they refused to interview Indigenous people as part of their investigation.
All hope for reform ended in October 1861 when nineteen white settlers were killed by Gayiri warriors at Cullin-la-ringo station. As Marr put it, “Cullin-la-ringo was the biggest slaughter of whites by blacks in Australian history. And that kind of just exploded the goodwill that was building up towards First Nations people. So that was the end of the pushbacks.”
By examining the Frontier Wars through the lens of the Uhrs, Marr highlights that the violence was contested and reactive. Peaceful colonisation has always been a myth but equally the methods used cannot be brushed away as normal in a different time.
Confronting your own family history —-creating that personal investment —- is what separates Killing for Country in its methodology but also in its purpose. Marr pointed out that some families have done their own investigations after reading the book. Others, he said, felt guilty for not being able too.
“A really close journalistic colleague of mine is a direct descendant of a squatter who poisoned Indigenous people along the Clarence River. A notorious, notorious killer… She says she’ll write it one day.”
The excitement of rummaging through the archives struck me as an important dimension of Marr’s work. Marr called Trove, a web service which digitised Australian newspapers and other primary sources, “a miracle.” “It’s thrilling,” he continued. “When you track down the facts, or you go on Trove, and you get that column right in the newspaper… it’s the best feeling.”
Beyond the atrocities, looking back also exposes the smaller lies families tell themselves across generations to maintain their own social standing. Marr called this “the cloven hoof of family history.”
In the course of his research he was able to debunk the family legends that they were connected to the Dukes of Roxburgh, or even Charles Darwin. “My grandmother’s maiden name was Wedgwood. She had this thing about being closely connected to Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. Bullshit! She was the granddaughter of the station master at Bradford station.”
When I researched my own family’s origins I found similar stories. My great great great grandmother Catharine Orliey told her family in Australia that her first husband was a successful clerk in London, when he in reality pushed sewage carts. A second marriage to a Tasmanian convict was also wiped from family memory.
Marr said it was understandable why people invented these stories when faced with a new land. “You arrive in the colony with a bullshit story to give you some feet, you know, some, some ground under your feet of connections and things.”
Despite the fictions being grander, we agreed the stories of what Patrick White called “Irish rabble,” were more compelling, not just because they were true, but also because it acknowledges the system thousands were trapped in. Killing for Country and my own investigations do not absolve people like the Uhrs, quite the opposite, but it makes clear colonisation was not usually a question of individual morality.
Just becoming ‘better people’ is insufficient. Reconciliation is not linear or inevitable. Marr told me that “John Howard is the most skilled politician any of us will see in our lifetimes,” because he proved all it took to set back First Nation’s justice was to massage history. As soon as people were given an excuse to turn a blind eye they jumped at the opportunity.
If only everyone could come across a photograph like Marr did.
David Marr is discussing Killing for Country at the Sydney Writers Festival on Sunday May 26th. Tickets can be found here.