It’s almost dusk and we’re eating out. Surrounded by mature elms, frog-song and the scent of cooling grass we’re on the broad veranda of Palmerston, a charming New England guest house. Our hard decision of the evening is between the seared scallops with Asian slaw and the duck dumplings. First world problems. A few steps away, though, in the dark-panelled hall, carrying the story behind the place betrays a deeper truth. This is blood-soaked soil.
We regard this, now, from a position of moral safety bordering on smugness. But are we so different? Our ongoing readiness to destroy hundreds of Indigenous sacred sites in the relentless pursuit of jobs and dollars suggests otherwise.
One of the most infamous massacres of Indigenous Australians took place on Henry Dangar’s property in New England.
The story on the poster is this. Palmerston was built outside Armidale by Albert Dangar, son of prominent pastoralist Henry Dangar (1796-1861) whose 1827 dismissal as assistant government surveyor for misappropriating land did nothing to prevent his election to the NSW upper house in 1851. So far, so NSW.
Dangar Snr also owned Myall Creek Station near Inverell where, in 1838, 12 armed and mounted stockmen rounded up 28 unarmed Wirrayaraay people – largely women and children – and, without provocation, hacked them to death.
Henry Dangar did not participate in the massacre but he did advise his employees not to report it and vigorously defended them at trial, to the point where the judge questioned his veracity. So the house, in some ways, has misery built into its foundations.
This story, the Myall Creek massacre, is relatively well known because of John Plunkett’s heroic prosecution of the stockmen and Mark Tedeschi’s marvellous book, Murder at Myall Creek: The Trial that Defined a Nation. But numerous other, similar incidents in the area are less well known. These include the follow-up murder of 30 or so remaining Wirrayaraay men and killings of sometimes hundreds of people at sites such as Slaughterhouse Creek, Waterloo Creek and Darkie Point, off Waterfall Way near Ebor. In that particularly sickening incident, memorably referenced in Judith Wright’s 1945 poem (and apologies, this is shocking, but it was Wright’s chosen name for that reason) Nigger’s Leap – scores of Aboriginal people were chased to the edge of a cliff, shot and pushed over.
“Did we not know, their blood channelled our rivers?” asks Wright. Even now the answer is no, on the whole, we don’t know. A University of Newcastle map of Indigenous massacres shows 311 mass killings of more than 8000 people, and those are just the ones that we know about. It puts the glorious houses of New England in a grimmer light – more like the grand antebellum mansions of the American deep south – but still we don’t address it. The school curriculum makes it possible but not necessary to teach the true history of our conquest and it is scarcely ever discussed – no doubt because it raises big, difficult questions of guilt, shame and reparation.
Gamil means no: Local Indigenous people object to Santos’s Narrabri gas project on cultural grounds.Credit:Getty
Bigger still, though, is the question of purchase. History shows that wealth and its beauty are nearly always built on the misery of others. From Egyptian times on, civilisation has been built, mostly, on slavery or empire. This is essentially theft. So the biggest question, which we still confront every day, is this: Are we doomed, as a species, to purchase the lives we want with the pain of others – nations, peoples or generations? Can we have civilisation without theft?
