Map of 250 indigenous massacres reveals Australia’s violent past
SYDNEY: An online map which has so far documented 250 massacres of indigenous peoples after Australia was colonised by the British is set to be expanded, researchers said yesterday, as they seek to uncover the country’s dark past.
The native Aboriginal population, who have occupied Australia for 50,000 years, were dispossessed of their lands by the arrival of settlers two centuries ago.
As the colonisers pushed into the vast interior of the island continent, historians said they were resisted by the local population, and thousands of men, women and children were killed.
“It wasn’t until I started to do this project that I realised how widespread frontier massacres were in Australia,” indigenous historian Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle told AFP.
“It is beginning to overturn how we think about the past. There’s
It wasn’t until I started to do this project that I realised how widespread frontier massacres were in Australia.
been a shift in consciousness in Australians and they are ready now to know and understand what happened.”
Since the government-funded ‘Colonial Frontier Massacres Map’ was launched a year ago focusing on eastern Australia from 17881872, Ryan said verified sites – where six or more ‘undefended Aboriginal people’ were killed – had risen from more than 150 to 250 with the help of the public.
More than 6,200 people were killed during the 250 massacres, she said, adding that the final tally of sites could be closer to 500.
The sites are not catalogued on the map until there is sufficient collaborating evidence to show the killings took place.
Sources include government historical records, personal journals and correspondence, shipping logs and oral and visual Aboriginal accounts.
Ryan said the field of massacre studies only emerged following the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.
International researchers found that as massacres tended to be carried out secretly, they were more easily documented later when people were not afraid of facing retribution for speaking out, she added.
Stage two of the map, which extends to 1930 and incorporates new sites in the Northern Territory and South Australia state, was launched yesterday, with plans to further expand it to 1960 and Western Australian state. — AFP
Lyndall Ryan, University of Newcastle indigenous historian