Before the Anzac Dawn: A Military History of Australia Before 1915

by John Connor, Craig Stockings (Editor)

Overview

Providing a comprehensive and compelling account of Australian military history before the failed Gallipoli campaign, this study demonstrates the extent to which this pre-World War I history has been forgotten. It begins with detailed accounts of both traditional indigenous warfare and frontier wars between European settlers and indigenous inhabitants before moving on to a description of the setting up of colonial navies, the red coats who guarded the colonies, Australians fighting in wars against the Maori of New Zealand, cadet and rifle clubs, and the wars in the Crimea and Sudan in which Australian forces participated. With contributions from leading experts in a number of different fields, this book is an insightful and surprising look into the extent to which Australians thought about and experienced war prior to the existence of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781742241616
Publisher:	UNSW Press
Publication date:	11/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Craig Stockings is an associate professor of history at the University of New South Wales in Canberra. His areas of academic interest concern general and Australian military history and operational analysis. He is the author of Bardia: Myth, Reality, and the Heirs of Anzac and The Torch and the Sword: A History of Army Cadet Movement in Australia as well as the editor of Anzac's Dirty Dozen and Zombie Myths of Australian Military History. John Connor is a senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales in Canberra. He is the author of The Australian Frontier Wars: 1788–1838 and Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence.

Read an Excerpt

Before The Anzac Dawn

A Military History of Australia to 1915

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By Craig Stockings, John Connor

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Craig Stockings and John Connor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-660-4

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CHAPTER 1

Traditional Indigenous warfare

John Connor

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa have much in common. Both buildings have a prominent position in their nation's capital. Both attract large numbers of visitors: 1.2 million people went to the Canadian War Museum in the 2011–12 financial year and 835 000 people attended the Australian War Memorial. Both display exhibits on the South African War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, peacekeeping operations and the war in Afghanistan. There is, however, one significant difference between the two institutions. The first gallery in the Canadian War Museum, entitled 'Wars on our soil: Earliest times to 1885', begins with displays on the traditional warfare of the Canadian indigenous peoples. The Australian War Memorial has no equivalent exhibition.

Australians are more reluctant than Canadians to acknowledge the traditional warfare among their nation's first inhabitants. There is a common view that Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not fight wars. This is partially a reaction to nineteenth-century settler stereotypes that falsely portrayed Aborigines as violent savages in order to justify their expropriation and subjugation, and partially a reflection of a current widespread belief that pre-contact Aborigines lived in an idyllic society in which armed conflict did not exist. So much evidence contradicts this assertion that it is clear that – in common with most other peoples throughout history – Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did have traditions of warfare. These ways of war combined violence and ceremony, and were a significant part of life for the 60 000 years that the first Australians have lived in this land. This chapter briefly introduces this large topic by examining the broad forms that traditional Aboriginal warfare took, and by describing a fraction of the thousands of different types of weapons made and used by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

It is true that some settlers during the 1800s exaggerated the level of violence in traditional Aboriginal warfare. Newspapers abounded with descriptions of the 'disgusting ferocity' and 'savage passions' with which Aborigines fought each other. It was convenient to claim, as former Premier Sir Arthur Palmer stated in the Queensland Parliament in 1880, that 'the native black of Australia was essentially a treacherous animal', because this supported the belief that the settlers had more right to the land than its Indigenous owners, and that it justified colonial governments' use of draconian measures to control their Aboriginal populations.

It is partially in response to this prejudice of the past that some recent historians have attempted to downplay the level of warfare in pre-contact Aboriginal society, or even to argue that such conflict did not occur at all. Michael Martin in On Darug Land: An Aboriginal Perspective asserts that 'traditional Aboriginal society was not an internally hostile one' and, in the caption to an illustration of a Sydney Aboriginal man, brings the reader's attention to the figure's woven possum hair belt and hair band – ignoring the club, spear and shield he also carries. When Australia Post issued a series of stamps featuring 'Aboriginal crafts' in 1987, the designs included close-up details of a Western Australian spear-thrower and a New South Wales shield. Both were described as 'hunting implements'. It is true that spear-throwers were used for hunting as well as warfare, but shields were clearly never used for hunting. According to the entry on 'weapons' in The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, 'The primary use of many weapons is for hunting or in ceremonies, and their use as weapons is only secondary'.

A related argument made, for example, by Ian Howie Willis in the same encyclopaedia's entry on 'warfare', accepts that 'there were undoubtedly wars between groups', but he stresses the difference between the causes of traditional Indigenous warfare and 'the causes for which nations make war: territorial expansion, securing economic advantage, differences in political and religious ideologies, and the urge to devastate and annihilate'. This is a valid point, but it can lead some to argue that, because Aboriginal warfare was different to the conflicts fought by modern nationstates, it cannot be defined as 'war'.

This is an unsustainable proposition. Human societies fought wars for thousands of years before the development of the modern state. The American historian John Lynn points out that how wars are fought depends on the 'values, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, preoccupations and the like' of the societies that fight them. This means that as societies have developed and changed throughout history, so too has war. As Lynn puts it:

War demands endurance, self-sacrifice, and heroism, but conceptions of cowardice and courage, or brutality and compassion are hardly constants across human societies; one culture's bravery is another's bravado and one's mercy is another's meekness. Neither are those values and identities that compel and inspire warriors in combat consistent across age and place.

The traditional warfare of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders must be understood in its own terms and not according to ideas of 'war' specific to other societies. Aboriginal society was organised in small, non-hierarchical kinship groups, and this structure was reflected in the scale and scope of their warfare. As Richard Broome has written: 'Internal conflict was managed by these kinship systems, and while violence was part of their world, as with any society, kinship acted to contain it'. Aborigines fought to protect their kinship group and to uphold their group's status in relation to neighbouring groups. Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz's famous definition of war – 'an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will' – can certainly be applied to traditional warfare in Australia.

Traditional Indigenous warfare was a significant component of Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal societies because both were warrior cultures. Many groups presented young males with weapons as part of the initiation ceremony of becoming a man. Darug youths were given spears which had special designs to identify their group, and Darug men were rarely seen without their spear. In north Queensland, youths were given a blank shield which they would paint immediately after their initiation. Some forms of traditional warfare, especially the concept of 'payback' and non-lethal spearings, remain part of Aboriginal customary law in some regions today. Phyllis Batumbil, a Yolngu elder from Mata Mata in Arnhem Land, stated that it took the Japanese air attacks on the Northern Territory in 1942 to cause a temporary truce in Yolngu traditional warfare. Once the Yolngu had played their part in the Allied war effort to 'get rid of the Japanese ... they got back again' to traditional warfare.

Traditional Indigenous warfare may have been limited but it was also universal. It was limited in the number of combatants because the groups involved were small, and limited in the duration of fighting because warriors always had to stop campaigning in order to resume food gathering. This form of warfare was universal because entire communities participated in it. Every initiated male became a warrior, and boys learnt to fight by playing with toy spears, shields, clubs and boomerangs. In some cases, Indigenous women also engaged in warfare. All members of every group could become a victim of war.

Horatio Hale, an American scientist who visited the colony of New South Wales in 1840, identified four main types of traditional Aboriginal warfare. Hale's classifications offer a generally useful introduction to a complex topic. These four forms are: formal battles, ritual trials, raids for women, and revenge attacks.

Formal battles, in which two groups of Aborigines fought each other and ended hostilities after a few participants had been killed or wounded, have often been compared to ceremony or sport rather than true warfare. This type of combat with limited casualties, however, had a practical purpose. For groups with only a few hundred, or even only a few dozen members, one or two deaths in every raid or battle added up to a sizeable percentage loss if warfare was constant, and could threaten the group's very existence. It was impossible to control casualties in impromptu raids and ambushes, but it was possible to limit losses in formal battles to the benefit of both sides. Daniel Paine, a settler living in Sydney in the 1790s, recognised the logic in this aspect of the local Darug's formal battles when he commented that had these actions been 'attended with those fatal consequences which result generally from the Battles of those Nations who are stiled Civilized and Christian the race would soon be extirpated from the country'.

Formal battles were usually fought to settle grievances between Aboriginal bands, and generally required days of preparation while the protagonists assembled. The Darug limited the duration of their formal battles by beginning them late in the afternoon and ending them soon after dusk. Darug women did not take part in the actual fighting of formal battles, although Captain David Collins observed that the signal for the commencement of one formal battle between a Darug and a Darawal group from south of Sydney was an old Darawal woman striking the Darug man Colbee with a club. As well, women participated in the formal battles by, as sailor Daniel Southwell wrote, making 'noisy expostulation' from the sidelines which could be heard over 'the Clashing of Spears and the strokes of lances'.

Ritual trials, like formal battles, had an established structure and were a punishment for murder, assault and perhaps other crimes in which a man was required to stand his ground and accept any wounds he might receive. Some may quibble with Hale's classification of these as warfare, but if one accepts Margaret Mead's definition of 'war' as any 'organized and socially sanctioned violence ... not regarded as murder', then trials carried out under Aboriginal customary law can certainly be included within this meaning. The weapons used in ritual trials varied: the Waka Waka north of Brisbane threw spears; the Wiradjuri on the Macquarie River in New South Wales used clubs; while the Kurnai of Gippsland in Victoria preferred boomerangs.

Raids for women are a form of traditional Aboriginal warfare that is frequently misunderstood. To prevent inbreeding, Aboriginal society recognised the need for men to marry women from outside their small kinship group. Sometimes women were 'abducted' only after they had given prior consent and her group's resistance 'was only simulated'. Historian Shino Konishi has argued that early European accounts of raids for women, and the use of these sources by authors in recent writing, give a false impression of Aboriginal men's 'sexual savagery'. In fact, raids for women are best understood not as examples of sexual violence, but as a form of economic warfare. The late economic historian Noel Butlin pointed out that in traditional Aboriginal society, women's food gathering and child-bearing abilities were economic resources which were fundamental to the group's survival. Some Aboriginal men held property rights over the women in their group, and Butlin argued that these property rights were at least 'very important', and were probably 'basic to Aboriginal order'.

Some Aboriginal raids for women were therefore aimed at transferring property from one group to another, and they must be considered warfare in the same way that fighting for economic reasons would be considered warfare in other societies. When Aboriginal men first met British men, they believed that, like rival Aboriginal groups, the British wanted to take their women. Wiradjuri elders hid their women before they met New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his entourage at Bathurst in 1815, and the King Ya-nup men of south-west Western Australia did the same in the 1820s and 1830s whenever they encountered members of the small British garrison at King George Sound (now the site of Albany).

Revenge attacks, the fourth type of Indigenous warfare, were carried out by one group on another group in retaliation for a death in the group. Traditional Aboriginal societies believed all deaths were caused by the evil conduct of others: violent deaths were recognised as being the result of a person's action, while non-violent deaths were believed to be the result of a person's sorcery. Accordingly, as historian Tiffany Shellam has written, 'Even natural deaths needed to be avenged'. For instance, Darug funerals included a ceremony in which the corpse would be asked who had caused the death, a person or a group would be 'named' as responsible, and they would be attacked in revenge.

The level of violence in revenge attacks varied across the continent. For the King Ya-nup people, Shellam argues that 'the target was an individual who represented the "tribe", rather than a particular person', and the retaliation was a spearing intended to wound rather than kill (the spear was aimed so as to avoid hitting vital organs). For the Darug of Sydney, revenge attacks were also sometimes non-lethal spearings, but on other occasions they resulted in the victim's death. On the Murray River, revenge attacks involved two or three men stealing silently into campsites at night and strangling their victim, sometimes with such stealth that the victim's group did not know about the killing until they discovered it in the morning. These war parties were grimly referred to as 'the ones who take you by the throat'.

As suggested by the different outcomes for which these four main forms of traditional warfare were waged, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders used a wide variety of weapon types and design. Innumerable designs were created, refined and abandoned over the 60 000 years of Aboriginal occupation of Australia. The famous Bradshaw Aboriginal rock paintings of north-west Western Australia, for example, depict types of spears that have long since been superseded.

The most common types of weapons were spears and clubs, produced, as The Australian Encyclopaedia put it in 1925, in 'endless varieties' of designs. Spears were manufactured as either thrusting or throwing weapons. Thrusting spears were shorter, generally between 1 and 1.5 metres long. Tasmanian Aborigines had a thrusting spear around 1 metre in length; the Darug of Sydney named their spear of this type the dooull.

Throwing spears were generally longer: some as much as 4 metres in length. Solid wooden spears were heavy – those used by the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands weighed up to 1.8 kilograms – and were hard to throw. The wood used to produce spears was therefore carefully chosen. Many were made from particular varieties of acacia tree, because they offered both strength and the ability to resharpen the spear point with a combination of heating and scraping without the wood cracking. In the central Western Desert, the wood of the wonga-wonga vine was used to make spears because of its flexibility. This plant was named for a group of mythological women with slender and pliable bodies.

In order to make throwing spears lighter, increasing their range and accuracy, some Aboriginal groups developed composite designs. These used a hollow reed or grass-tree stalk for the spear body, joined with gum to a short spearhead of solid wood. The Darug's composite spear had a main body constructed from the stalk of the grass tree Xanthorrhoea. The material used to provide the deadly tip of the spear varied according to local availability. Darug living on Sydney Harbour used sharpened shells or fish bones, while those living inland tipped their spears with stone or kangaroo bone.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Before The Anzac Dawn by Craig Stockings, John Connor. Copyright © 2013 Craig Stockings and John Connor. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Contributors,
Introduction John Connor,
1 Traditional Indigenous warfare John Connor,
2 Hrontier warfare in Australia Jonathan Richards,
3 British soldiers in colonial Australia Peter Stanley,
4 The battle for the Eureka Stockade Gregory Blake,
5 Australian naval defence Greg Swinden,
6 Australians in the New Zealand Wars Damien Fenton,
7 The rifle clubs Andrew Kilsby,
8 Australia's boy soldiers: The army cadet movement Craig Stockings,
9 Australians in the wars in Sudan and South Africa Craig Wilcox,
10 Radical nationalists and Australian invasion novels Augustine Meaher IV,
11 Edwardian transformation Craig Wilcox,
12 The capture of German New Guinea John Connor,
Notes,
Index,