Bury My Heart at Butchers Creek

In almost a month of traveling in Australia, it has been almost impossible to have a conversation with, or even a conversation about, indigenous aboriginal Australians. Those we have met are not interested in tourist chit chat and everyone else doesn’t know how to discuss the subject.

When I ask today’s Australians about the original Australians I get a range of responses. First there is the self avowed racist “They are only a percent of the population and what can we do anyway? What would this country have been if we hadn’t shown up, want us to stay in the stone age? And it’s stupid that someone who is only part aboriginal can claim all their rights” (see footnote)

Then we have the wholly patronising “We can’t just give them money as they’ll just spend it on booze and gambling”. Leave aside the fact that every pub in Australia has a betting shop and a room full of poker machines called pokies for booze and gambling of all sorts.

Finally we get the more realistic fatalist shrug that still leads nowhere … “Not sure we know what to do frankly. It’s a problem”.

Riding around Victoria this past week, it strikes me that one thing might be to actually recognize the events of the past and memorialize them.

The US 7th Cavalry massacred 300 Lakota indians at Wounded Knee. This is now a Historical National Landmark and the US Congress officially apologized in 1990 on the centenary of the event. In Victoria alone there were dozens of Wounded Knees in the mid 1800s. We have passed through a number of these places and I looked for any historical markers but didn’t find any.

When you read the Gippsland lifestyle magazine it is full of arty towns and horse riding advice and wine festivals but Victoria was also the epicentre of the clash between white squatters and the indigenous people. So much so that there is a wikipedia page dedicated to the Gippsland Massacres but there were atrocities all over the state – none of which are memorialized anywhere. It is hard to find ANY information actually; the closest is a document from the 1990s that was compiled for the Koorie Heritage Trust twenty years ago – shown here.

A classic example is in Benalla whose Wikipedia entry mentions the Faithful Massacre in which a handful of settlers died in an argument with the indigenous people but fails to mention the hundred or so locals who were slaughtered in reprisal by Angus McMillan. When you visit Benalla on the Broken River where these events took place next to the town historical museum, there is a plaque commemorating … you guessed it … Ned Kelly.

Yes, Australia has made huge strides to recognize traditional owners of the land and that was then and this is now. But just because nobody wants to remember, you can be sure that these stories are now woven into the oral histories and collective memories of the original Australians.

Footnote – This person was half right – Indigenous Australians are 3.4% of the population and in Victoria you can claim aboriginal status if you have 1/32nd original blood.