There was a time when Netanyahu’s tactics would go unquestioned. That time helps explain those who continue to give Israel unqualified and unquestioning support and ties in with the “hard man” image Peter Dutton wants to own, writes Michael Pascoe.

Cullin-la-Ringo, near Springsure in central Queensland, is the site of Australia’s biggest single massacre of colonists in the Frontier War – also known as the Wills tragedy. Gayiri warriors armed with nulla nullas killed 19 men, women and children camped in preparation for establishing a station on 260 square kilometres of Gayiri land.

In the way of such things, the attack was in revenge for the murder of Gayiri men by a neighbouring squatter who falsely accused them of stealing cattle.

And, in the further way of such things, more than 300 and perhaps as many as 370 Gayiri men, women and children were subsequently hunted down and slaughtered.

Taking the higher number – “dispersals” were routinely underreported, if reported at all – the revenge kill ratio was 19.5 to one. There was no questioning of such murder, of genocide, only praise. It used to be so easy, even easier, if a coloniser had been attacked. Wiping out the blacks was policy.

That was 1863. Two decades later, Peter Dutton’s great-great-grandfather became the local member for the Springsure area and was Queensland’s Secretary for Lands as the bloody colonisation, the massacres, rolled on in north Queensland.

Did the government follow Foreign Affairs department advice on Gaza, or did Fatima Payman?

The Frontier Wars

The Frontier War across northern Australia, the genocide, continued at least into the 1930s – or to 1981 if you count a mass poisoning in Alice Springs that killed two people and hospitalised another six.

The last officially approved killings were in 1928, a series of raids west of Alice Springs led by Constable William George Murray. Collectively called the Coniston massacre, they followed the murder of a white dingo trapper by a Walpiri man. A hasty board of inquiry tasked with whitewashing Coniston found that 31 Aboriginal people had been killed, each justifiably so. The Walpiri put the figure at 200, so a revenge kill ratio of somewhere between 31 and 200 to one.  And the man who killed the dingo trapper was not among the dead.

The nobbled inquiry’s chairman subsequently regretted his involvement, saying that if the same circumstances happened again, someone would be hanged for the killings. Massacring blackfellas had become less politically popular.

Historians Tony Roberts and Henry Reynolds have documented the role of colonial politicians, including Alexander Downer’s grandfather, John Downer, in masterminding, condoning or concealing mass murder in the late 19th century. It was popular policy with electors in the north – Aboriginal people were not electors – but became steadily less so in the cities and internationally.

Israel kill ratios

A century later, Israel is finding lavish kill ratios and large-scale “collateral damage” losses, to use the euphemism, are increasingly unacceptable internationally, too.

Bibi Netanyahu’s Gaza kill ratio is running at more than 34 to one based on the toll of identified war dead, with an overwhelming percentage of non-combatant women and children. A Lancet article has reported a conservative estimate of the indirect death toll of such a war – from disease, starvation, and destroyed health infrastructure – would be four times the present count,

a kill ratio of some 140 to one, nearly eight per cent of Gaza’s pre-war population.

Such percentages would not have been a problem in northern Australia a century or so ago, especially given the provocation of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, a Cullin-la-ringo. The percentage of some Aboriginal nations killed by colonisers was closer to 100 per cent than eight. I can find no current mention of Gayiri people. 

The prelude to the sparks for the Cullin-la-Ringo, Coniston and other massacres during the Frontier War was universal – dispossession, oppression and desperation in the face of colonisation. 

It is no accident that among the democracies most outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s Gaza war are those with strong memories of their own colonisation – South Africa and Ireland.

Our colonial story

Australia’s colonial story is more recessed, history is written by the victors, the standard fare for most of us a sanitised version of the white man’s triumph against the odds, blackfellas barely recorded in school texts – and then dismissively – until relatively recently. The impact of the colonisers’ claims of terra nullius was not considered, not a concern.

Having failed to accept the invitation of the Uluru statement, “our” history remains that of the colonisers, not the Australians. To the extent it was ever mentioned, the Frontier Wars were portrayed as “treacherous blacks”, never Australians fighting invaders stealing their land and murdering its owners, wholesale rape and pillage.

The psychology of denial runs deep, the creeds and attitudes handed down through generations, if only subconsciously. Not all or always, but often enough,

resulting in the inability of much of the conservative base to come to terms with our heritage, with families’ pasts, with the source of our wealth.

It is little wonder then that the side of our polity labelled “conservative” unreservedly backs the Netanyahu government and its actions and has no criticism of the kill ratio, the fatal collateral damage of tens of thousands of children, the broader damage of hundreds of thousands. To the victor, the spoils.

Peter Dutton’s stance

If Peter Dutton has expressed any sympathy for those tens of thousands of innocents killed and the greater number maimed in Gaza or voiced any support for a ceasefire, I’ve missed it. Maybe at some point in the future, he will say he said something to someone, like his apology for attacking Lebanese migrants.

Total unconditional support for Netanyahu and casting shade on all Palestinians also works well as an Islamophobic dog whistle, the immediate political aim, but the underlying culture is one of being on the colonisers’ side, backing the perceived superior race/religion/culture against those treacherous inferior natives.

It’s the same conservative culture that supported apartheid South Africa until it was no more, that more recently would preference white South African farmers as our humanitarian intake, that would prefer to have no Palestinians here or, for that matter, Lebanese. Well, not Muslim Lebanese, anyway. It is the culture seeking the comfort and cosseting of the white Anglosphere in Asia.

And going hard, going brutal, “playing tackle, not touch”, seeing the world only in black and white, is the strong man image Dutton is consciously promoting in support of what is becoming the LNP’s must regular chorus: “Albanese is weak.”

In the way of conservative thinking and some electorates’ voting, the “strong man” appeals even to people who may disagree with the policies espoused.

Cue the magnificent Paul North cartoon of a wolf politician’s billboard promising “I will eat you” and sheep saying, “He tells it like it is”.

The hard man image

There is a hard man image but no nuance in backing the colonisers’ version of history without quibble. Our own preferred coloniser history – begone you traitorous black armband types – resonates with the story offered by the Netanyahu extremists. They, too, believe the land is theirs by right for the taking and making fruitful, that no apology is required.

A century after Coniston, it is not that simple anymore. Despite the journalists killed and excluded, a world mainly without coloniser sympathies watches and is discomforted. In light of Gaza, Norway, Spain, and Ireland joined 143 other nations this year in recognising the state of Palestine. France, Japan, South Korea and Slovenia were among the Security Council members to support full Palestinian membership of the UN. Only the US voted against it, using its veto power.

The world has changed. The percentage of the “native” population Netanyahu would need to kill to achieve Queensland’s Frontier War victory would not be countenanced, even while nothing more than “concern” is voiced as the percentage rises.

The mutual intractability of the combatants ensures the disaster continues and will be reborn in the survivors. Of course, Hamas are terrorists – what else could they be against the power and might of US-backed Israel when they are offered no hope of improvement?

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

Peter Ustinov.

In the eyes of the coloniser culture, as demonstrated by the Murdoch press, IRA letter bombs were appalling terrorism, but thousands of exploding pagers were admirable Israeli genius no matter who they killed or maimed.

In the eyes of the coloniser culture, bombing multiple families to kill one Hamas or Hezbollah target is acceptable. Collateral damage is irrelevant when you believe you are fighting a total war – there are no innocents.

The Israeli extremists can point to Dresden and Hiroshima and Cambodia and Vietnam and Iraq and wonder why they should be criticised for killing civilians. It is a fair question.

But theirs is a colonialist’s war in a mainly post-colonial world.

A century after Coniston – minor massacres unless you were Walpiri – peace can no longer be won by extermination.

Is the ICC warrant against Netanyahu heralding real change in international justice?

 

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.