Gross Abuse

Richard Fotheringham The Australian
06 October 2010

The discovery of a memoir by Steele Rudd's father sheds light on the murderous collision between settlers and Aborigines on the Darling Downs

European settlement in Australia was bloody brutal. The idea that on small or imagined provocation you had to kill Aborigines indiscriminately was tacitly acknowledged throughout the immigrant rural communities: "how else could the land be made safe for settlers and their families?"

Here is a book review that reveals a few historical records of southern Queensland's frontier wars. An uncomfortable silence still hangs over the most controversial issue in Australian colonial history.

Expand / Caption

Australia Day stands as a reminder of massacres so why should Australia's First Nations People celebrate it?

This is not some John Howard "black armband" view of history, rather a white man's whitewash. You can shuttle history, but you cannot shuttle facts. It would be a great Australia Day if it faced honesty, historical facts, abandonment, hypocrisy, shelved superiority and embarked upon an exercise of spiritual empathy rather than religious hubris ...

In the light of the news about Australia's seat at the United Nations, it is sanguine to recollect what John Pilger said in 2012; "No country since apartheid South Africa has been more condemned by the UN for its racism than Australia."

The West Australian Government is under fire over its compensation offer to pay lost wages to thousands of the state's Indigenous workers.

Between 1905 and 1972, the government withheld up to three-quarters of the wages earned by workers on state-run Native Welfare Settlements, but they never got their hard earned money back.