A Timeline of Terror (Nullius)
From massacres to smallpox -- since January 26, 1788 life has been nothing short of horrific for First Nations people.
Every year we approach January 26 hearing two narratives. It’s Australia Day. Or its Invasion/Survival Day.
I get it Australia: you’re a proud lot, and you want to let everyone know how proud you are. In essence, there is nothing wrong with that. Everyone deserves to be proud of who they are.
But what specifically, about January 26 is there to be proud of?
If you were to ask me, I’d say not much.
This land has a rich history of culture from hundreds of different First Nations clans, over 120,000 years of it depending on which study you look at. But with the landing of Captain James Cook, it was all erased.
Can you imagine if I walked into your house, said “G’day mate, this is my joint now. You can go sit out the front on the lawn if you want.”
Then while you watched, I took all your photos down. I took all your kid’s toys and put them in the bin. I sanded over the height markers you made on the door frame on every one of your kid’s birthdays. I took all the stuff your parents had left you and threw that out. Your dad’s ashes, that were in the urn above the fireplace, that’s in the bin too.
And all you can do is watch, and with every bit of you that I erase, you lose you’re voice too. I bet you’d take every chance you could to say whatever you can about it.
Which is what First Nations people do — and for good reason.
January 26, 1788
Since January 26, 1788 life has been nothing short of horrific for First Nations people.
In 1789 Smallpox broke out, if you do your research, you’ll find out that it is widely accepted as intentional.
It also didn’t take long until the massacres started.
In 1791, three years after Cook landed, was the first one. They continued for another 137 years until the Coniston massacre in 1928. Only 92 years ago.
According to the University of Newcastle, there have been 311 massacres recorded, so far. That works out to over 2 massacres a year. So, every 6 months it was deemed necessary, for whatever reason in this country, to go out and murder a bunch of First Nations people.
Slavery was also prevalent; it wasn’t always called that though.
From the 1840’s up until the 1970’s, slavery or a form of slavery was active in Australia. South Sea Islanders account for many slaves found in Australia — between 1840 and 1904 over 60,000 slaves were stolen from the South Pacific Islands, leaving many descendants here, even today.
Between the 1860’s and 1970’s First Nations people were taken and forced to work, having to endure no minimal work conditions, harsh treatment and wages stolen by employers or the government.
It’s important to note that settlements are still being made in court to repay workers who were robbed by government schemes.
The Stolen Generations
To go with massacres and slavery, I could easily add the Stolen Generations, but I surely shouldn’t have to go into detail about who they are, after Kevin Rudd issued an official apology back in 2008.
It was a monumental moment in Australian history — the government actually admitting that they got something wrong. #ScottyfromMarketing might be able to look back and learn something.
While the apology to the Stolen Generation is widely appreciated, the point of an apology is to express regret and understanding to what you’ve done wrong.
But since then, not much has really changed.
Kids are still getting taken left, right and centre. You need only engage with your local First Nations community and you’ll hear all kinds of stories. I’ve seen several live feeds on Facebook from parents trying to protect their children from authorities who want to take them, often with no explanation — its really confronting.
This is why activism is so important to so many First Nations people; and it isn’t anything new.
A History Of Protest
The first obvious protest from the beginning of colonisation on the 26th was the Frontier Wars, which lasted between 1788 and went into the 20th century.
The first political protest that I could find occurred in 1928, when First Nations toymaker Anthony Fernando, who was on a self-imposed exile form a country he’d grown disgusted with, walked up to London’s Australia House, with toy skeletons all over his clothing, exclaiming something along the lines of “this is what you’ve left of my people”.
First Nations voices have been as loud as possible since then, with the first recorded activism against January 26 being on that date in 1938 — a decade after Fernando’s stand. On that day a mob of First Nations men and women gathered in Sydney at the Australia Hall to participate in a Day of Mourning.
Other protests about working conditions were held before 1930, and more protests since. It’s easy to look back and think that not much happened because of the lack of ease of communication and a lack of records. But in todays tech age its much easier to organise and unite.
In 2019 for example, tens of if not hundreds of thousands protested against Australia Day. There weren’t any ads on TV about it, there were no ads in the paper. What there was, was social media. This innovative way of organising has allowed for a bombardment of voices.
Voices from First nations people, Refugees, Immigrants and sadly even White Supremacists. But for all of this evolution in technology (and the odd royal commission), what has really changed?
Our kids still get taken. Our people still die in custody. We still work in horrible conditions — just look at the work for the dole scheme, and we still suffer every day from systemic racism.
The timeline continues.
Travis Akbar is a Wongatha man living on Peramangk country, Adelaide. He is a film critic and freelance writer. Follow Travis @TravAkbar