AUSTRALIA'S STONEHENGE TALK
Australian frontier wars & The Genocide of the Sovereign People.
People might wonder why Australia’s Stonehenge seems to have been forgotten and untouched by Sovereign People of the region.
The answer is mostly simple. We killed them all.
There used to be many thousands of inhabitants before invasion. However, after forced famine, massacres, kidnapping, and biological and conventional warfare, by 1910 there were about 10 full-blood first nation people left, by the 1920's they had been completely exterminated.
In early 2013, when I first walked upon what is commonly called “Australia’s Stonehenge” the site was in very bad shape. The stone arrangement, carefully mapped out by Fred Fordham, the Brunswick Heads schoolteacher and J.C Wiburd, from the Archeological Society, consisted of scattered pieces of sandstone. The site, after being extensively bulldozed in the 1940s, had been left to disappear under course grass and the hoof of countless cattle. An old, broken barbed wire fence ran through the middle of it and the farmer, who bulldozed it and showed me the site was happy to drive upon the broken sandstones with his four-wheeled drive pushing the stones further into the ground.
The old man, who died in 2014, said that it had been many years since anyone had come to the site and that I was the first person to approach him and ask him about them.
Even the old newspaper reports from the 1930's describe the site as covered by debri and showing no signs of having been used for years.
If anyone cared for the site or saw it as in any way significant, there was no evidence of it.
If the site was ever of importance, that it could have ever been forgotten, and gone to ruin and destruction, can be very easily explained. The reason was that the original custodians had been almost wiped off the face of the Earth.
The treatment of aboriginal people, by Europeans, since invasion, has been, overall, appalling. The first contact between whites and the owners of the mound sets the scene. In 1840, before even whites had settled the area, cedar getters, who had come to cut down the magnificent trees that were plentiful, came through, tearing down the tallest and best examples of these wide 60- meter high trees. They came to a clearing, where aboriginal elders were holding ceremony. The timbermen’s response was a show of force and to chase the elders, who disappeared into the remaining forest. The tree getters continued on relentlessly bringing more trees crashing down.
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Massacres of a people who had lived on the land for tens of thousands of years then began. We know of the 1842 Pelican Creek Tragedy were 100 aboriginal people from the Bundjalung Nation were put to death by sword and gunshot. The destruction of the forests, from which the original people sourced for food, brought on starvation. The original people resorted to taking a few of the sheep introduced by the European settlers. In retaliation, a further 100 aboriginal people were murdered, were killed at Evan’s Head
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The drive to make aboriginal people extinct occurred all over the continent of Australia and Tasmania. By the 1840s, the vast majority of aboriginal people had been systematically murdered. This was by massacre, purposely-introduced diseases that the original Australians had no immunity against, and random acts of violence. In the region of where “Australia’s Stonehenge” was located, far northeastern New South Wales, the genocide was longer-lasting. The inaccessible mountainous terrain made finding and killing aboriginal people more difficult.
By the 1950s, while the European’s had conquered most of Australia, massacres in this region were still occurring. Aboriginal women and children were especially targeted. In East Ballina, at least 40 women and children of the Bundjalung Nation Arakwal were killed while they slept. In the 1860s at least 200 Bundjalung people, in South Ballina were killed when they were fed poisoned bread.
By the 1870’s only, a few of the original people were left alive. The old primeval forest had been taken away or burnt to ash. It was comparatively easy for the government to steal the remaining children from their mothers, imprison the fathers, and forbid elders to pass on their knowledge or language.
My examination of later 19th-century magistrate documents, from the local Mullumbimby courthouse, reflects these brutalities. The records reveal that aboriginal people, who were brought before the courts for minor charges of disorderly conduct, were given merciless arbitrary treatment.
Given all this that any survivor could have kept their sanity let alone a full record of their history is a major victory for them. The destruction of the people has been reflected in the destruction of the mound, which has faced bulldozing, neglect, derision, erosion and a century of cattle grazing. Like the original people of Australia, it survives and we should be grateful for the duel miracle of it.
People might wonder why Australia’s Stonehenge seems to have been forgotten and untouched by Sovereign People of the region.
The answer is mostly simple. We killed them all.
There used to be many thousands of inhabitants before invasion. However, after forced famine, massacres, kidnapping, and biological and conventional warfare, by 1910 there were about 10 full-blood first nation people left, by the 1920's they had been completely exterminated.
In early 2013, when I first walked upon what is commonly called “Australia’s Stonehenge” the site was in very bad shape. The stone arrangement, carefully mapped out by Fred Fordham, the Brunswick Heads schoolteacher and J.C Wiburd, from the Archeological Society, consisted of scattered pieces of sandstone. The site, after being extensively bulldozed in the 1940s, had been left to disappear under course grass and the hoof of countless cattle. An old, broken barbed wire fence ran through the middle of it and the farmer, who bulldozed it and showed me the site was happy to drive upon the broken sandstones with his four-wheeled drive pushing the stones further into the ground.
The old man, who died in 2014, said that it had been many years since anyone had come to the site and that I was the first person to approach him and ask him about them.
Even the old newspaper reports from the 1930's describe the site as covered by debri and showing no signs of having been used for years.
If anyone cared for the site or saw it as in any way significant, there was no evidence of it.
If the site was ever of importance, that it could have ever been forgotten, and gone to ruin and destruction, can be very easily explained. The reason was that the original custodians had been almost wiped off the face of the Earth.
The treatment of aboriginal people, by Europeans, since invasion, has been, overall, appalling. The first contact between whites and the owners of the mound sets the scene. In 1840, before even whites had settled the area, cedar getters, who had come to cut down the magnificent trees that were plentiful, came through, tearing down the tallest and best examples of these wide 60- meter high trees. They came to a clearing, where aboriginal elders were holding ceremony. The timbermen’s response was a show of force and to chase the elders, who disappeared into the remaining forest. The tree getters continued on relentlessly bringing more trees crashing down.
-
Massacres of a people who had lived on the land for tens of thousands of years then began. We know of the 1842 Pelican Creek Tragedy were 100 aboriginal people from the Bundjalung Nation were put to death by sword and gunshot. The destruction of the forests, from which the original people sourced for food, brought on starvation. The original people resorted to taking a few of the sheep introduced by the European settlers. In retaliation, a further 100 aboriginal people were murdered, were killed at Evan’s Head
-
The drive to make aboriginal people extinct occurred all over the continent of Australia and Tasmania. By the 1840s, the vast majority of aboriginal people had been systematically murdered. This was by massacre, purposely-introduced diseases that the original Australians had no immunity against, and random acts of violence. In the region of where “Australia’s Stonehenge” was located, far northeastern New South Wales, the genocide was longer-lasting. The inaccessible mountainous terrain made finding and killing aboriginal people more difficult.
By the 1950s, while the European’s had conquered most of Australia, massacres in this region were still occurring. Aboriginal women and children were especially targeted. In East Ballina, at least 40 women and children of the Bundjalung Nation Arakwal were killed while they slept. In the 1860s at least 200 Bundjalung people, in South Ballina were killed when they were fed poisoned bread.
By the 1870’s only, a few of the original people were left alive. The old primeval forest had been taken away or burnt to ash. It was comparatively easy for the government to steal the remaining children from their mothers, imprison the fathers, and forbid elders to pass on their knowledge or language.
My examination of later 19th-century magistrate documents, from the local Mullumbimby courthouse, reflects these brutalities. The records reveal that aboriginal people, who were brought before the courts for minor charges of disorderly conduct, were given merciless arbitrary treatment.
Given all this that any survivor could have kept their sanity let alone a full record of their history is a major victory for them. The destruction of the people has been reflected in the destruction of the mound, which has faced bulldozing, neglect, derision, erosion and a century of cattle grazing. Like the original people of Australia, it survives and we should be grateful for the duel miracle of it.