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00:00 David Maher, what was more shocking to you, discovering your ancestors had been
00:05 employed to kill Aboriginal people or the apparently industrial scale on which
00:10 that was occurring? Well the first shock, I mean shocks can come like a blow and
00:18 that was like a blow. I found myself sitting there looking at a picture of my
00:24 great-great-grandfather in the uniform of the native police and my world hasn't
00:34 been the same since that moment. It was a huge shock but I knew within half an
00:42 hour that I had to write a book about it because you know I've been telling
00:47 people for decades we have to face the past and I fought in the history wars
00:52 under the banner of Manning Clark. I thought I knew the fundamental story,
00:57 I've read the books, I'm a huge admirer of Henry Reynolds and his cohort
01:04 of historians but it's much much worse than I had thought. What did you know
01:11 about the native police before you started? When I saw Reggie Ewer in this
01:16 uniform I thought for a wonderful moment that I might be mistaken about the
01:22 native police. They might have been quite a nice outfit I thought and I went
01:27 quickly to Wikipedia. No, they were not only exactly what I thought they were
01:31 but Reg Ewer's exploits were there in Wikipedia and so were his brother Darcy's.
01:38 They were notorious killers. People who have seen what I've written are shocked
01:44 to discover about the native police. They maybe heard the name but it is a
01:50 discovery for people who are even well read on the business of the Australian
01:55 frontier. A killer, a band of killers that operated for 60 years and killed, well
02:06 all of their records have disappeared, presumed destroyed, but scholars working
02:11 on the kinds of ratios of how many blacks died for every white are now
02:15 talking about the possibility that this band killed 40,000 people, 40,000
02:22 Aboriginal people in its time. Because you were tracing your family's
02:28 particular connection you do sort of cut a swathe, shall we say, through a
02:32 particular history from, shall we say, the Murrumbidgee north and it seems to get
02:37 worse the further north it goes. What I've written is a narrative history of
02:44 the native police through the eyes of a family that backed it, directed it and
02:50 served in it and in this way by cutting a path as you say a swathe through that
02:57 history it's possible to see the landscape much more clearly than in some
03:03 of the very very fine historical studies. This is the narrative, this is the story,
03:07 this takes this family from its days of land taking on a gigantic scale,
03:14 600,000 acres of land, politics, the economy, the way in which this system of
03:23 killing was set up and then its work and you're right, the further it went north
03:31 really the worse it became and the killings were notorious. This was an
03:39 armed band of killers working for the Queensland Government which was quite
03:45 happy to admit at the same time that there was no law to authorise them to do
03:51 the killings they were doing. They didn't care about that a bit. It's hard not to
03:56 read the book in September 2023 and think about the resonances it has about
04:05 the sort of racism we're seeing in the debate around the referendum now. Tell us
04:12 a little bit about whether you were struck by some of those things and the
04:16 sorts of things that were said at that time. The arguments, I mean I was under
04:20 the delusion that the notion of sort of attacks on woke people were kind of
04:28 invented maybe 15 or 20 years ago but they weren't. In the 1830s there are
04:38 newspapers, one of them belonging to that appalling windbag Wentworth, who attacked
04:45 what he called the whalers for Aborigines, the people who were saying
04:49 don't shoot, don't steal, these are human beings. They were attacked for living in
04:55 the cities, being elite, not knowing what they were talking about and showing off
05:01 their humanitarian views. It's exactly the same. That same argument is still
05:08 being used nearly two centuries later. John Howard used to talk about the
05:14 black-armed band view of history and say that we couldn't be held accountable
05:18 or shouldn't feel guilty about what had happened back in the day. You say in your
05:25 book that you've written it as an act of atonement. What do you feel about your
05:32 connection with your family's history in this now? I'm not guilty. I didn't
05:37 lift up a rifle, I wasn't riding into a camp at dawn but I am ashamed. In the
05:44 same way that we can be really proud of what our family has done you know
05:47 generations ago, we can also be ashamed. But that kind of personal shame started
05:53 to look almost trivial as my research and writing went on. The shame is
06:01 national and that notion of you know sneering at people for writing the truth
06:10 of what happened in this country is so John Howard. But there are still people
06:15 around who think that the history of Australia is cook, convicts, sheep, gold,
06:25 Gallipoli. It's not. In between and behind all of that this country was being
06:33 conquered by Europeans. The true history of this country is a history of conquest
06:39 and we now live, we European Australians now live with the conquered and we have
06:48 decent obligations to them as we always have decent obligations to the enemy we
06:56 defeat. That sense of decent obligation is being trashed in the referendum
07:05 debate. Trashed. You know I've spent four and a half years in this history
07:13 writing this story of what went on and I look at the referendum debate and I
07:21 think these wars haven't finished. This is just another round. It's just going on
07:31 and how long does it go on for? Does it go on forever? David Marr thanks so much for
07:37 talking to us. Thanks Laura.
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