Red Rag

I stumbled across an article of a few days ago in the Courier Mail today (not a newspaper I regularly read, but oh well), that claims to have made an important discovery in Australia’s history of murder and dispossession of the Indigenous population:

A former Queensland police commissioner slaughtered hundreds of Aborigines, according to his own hand-written files.

The Courier-Mail found the notes in the State Archives while investigating claims by historian Keith Windschuttle who released a book last year denying claims of widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aborigines.

The personal reports of Sub-Inspector Frederick Urquhart who rose to become Queensland Police Commissioner from 1917 to 1921, show Aboriginal men, women and children were slaughtered on his orders after the death of a white pastoralist.

He led native police in what is reputedly Australia’s biggest massacre of Aborigines — the 1884 Battle Mountain attack on Kalkadoon people in northwest Queensland. …

The Urquhart reports refer to “dispersal” of Aborigines, a term of the era for killing.

He wrote: “I gave the order to fire and 30 of the blacks were shot”. In another he described how his group surrounded a “large number” of blacks and opened fire. He noted “none escaped”.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which restricts itself to Tasmania’s supposedly bloodless past, but my best guess is that the paper has assigned someone to study the archives ahead of Windschuttle’s next book, which will likely deal with Queensland.

While it would be nice to read more than just this short article about it (perhaps John Quiggin has seen something more substantial?), the find suggests an official policy involving the slaughter of innocent men, women and children based solely on their race. In my opinion, that amounts to genocide.