Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia's Frontier Wars

Out of the silence: the history and memory of South Australia's frontier wars Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck 2012 Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 233pp, ill., ISBN 9781743050392 (pbk) The Colony of South Australia was established at a key moment in the history of British interactions with Indigenous peoples from around its empire: the House of Commons was conducting a Select Committee on Aborigines (183537); the anti-slavery campaign had recently won a major victory with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833; and the prevailing wisdom in the Colonial Office was progressive and humanitarian. This mood was reflected in South Australia's founding documents - in the Letters Patent, which defined the nature and extent of the new colony, and in the Proclamation, which was read by Governor John Hindmarsh on 28 December 1836. These documents asserted the moral right of the British to claim sovereignty over the new colony, but enshrined a commitment to provide legal protection to Aboriginal people as British subjects. The great challenge for the colonial government in realising this vision is one of the key themes of Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck's fine book, Out of the silence: the history and memory of South Australia's frontier wars. From the outset, Foster and Nettelbeck identify the key paradox at the heart of the Select Committee report. While 'its language of humanitarian liberalism' criticised historical neglect and mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples, it 'did not fundamentally challenge Britain's continuing possession of new territories' (pp.1-2). As a result, the rapid expansion of European settlement in South Australia was no less likely to provoke resistance from Aboriginal peoples than had earlier colonial examples. A different outcome was to be achieved, however, by the fair and uniform application of the rule of law to settlers and Aborigines alike. Marshalling numerous important case studies from the first decades of settlement, Foster and Nettelbeck show, however, that attempts to impose the rule of law on the frontier were severely undermined by a range of factors, including legal debates over the amenability of Aboriginal people to British law and the inadmissibility of Aboriginal evidence in court. Furthermore, a reluctance of judges to adjudicate crimes between Aboriginal people indicated that the latter continued to exercise a de facto sovereignty, the recognition of which undermined the idealistic vision of the founding documents. In exploring these issues, the book complements Alan Pope's (2011) One law for all? Aboriginal people and criminal law in early South Australia, which is based on his earlier thesis. Whereas Pope's book focuses on legal history, comprehensively reviewing all cases involving Aboriginal people in the early colonial period, Foster and Nettelbeck aim primarily to understand the trajectories of frontier violence, which more often than not extended beyond the reach of the law. They convey vividly the shocking nature of the summary justice dealt out to Aboriginal people, often those who had no involvement in the murders of settlers that had prompted military action; but with balance and fairness they also depict the fear and anxiety felt by settlers, such as the 'shattered community' of Port Lincoln in the wake of the bitter frontier conflict there. The result is an account that asserts the reality of a war of conquest, which sits uncomfortably alongside the foundational ideals of peaceful settlement, philanthropic duty and the status of Aboriginal people as British subjects. Out of the silence analyses several violent confrontations discussed in the authors' earlier book, Fatal collisions (2001, with Rick Hosking), including the Maria massacre and the Rufus River conflicts, but there is a compelling rationale for revisiting this material. Fatal collisions was published a year before Keith Windschuttle's (2002) controversial revisionist history of the Tasmanian frontier, The fabrication of Aboriginal history, and one suspects that Windschuttle's book (and the impact it had on Australia's 'history wars') motivated the authors to write a more comprehensive account of the South Australian chapter in this national story. …