Killing for Country is not an easy read, but it is an important one. Post the Voice outcome, it is especially galling and devasting to read of push-back, excuses and hyperbole used by the agitated establishment.
David Marr has written a compelling and shocking personal history of the brutal frontier killings of First Peoples in the quest for the colony’s expansion and take-over of indigenous land. What makes it personal are his direct ancestral links with the Native Police, the para-military group acting with indiscriminate violence and appalling impunity. Tactics such as using armed indigenous troopers from other First Nations, far from their own bush homes, to carry out cullings masked as ‘dispersion’, served to impersonalise and allow officers to act without familiarity of those they slaughtered.
Marr is a master of carefully researching and analysing historical sources and evidence. The result is disarming for a contemporary reader with access to the past voices and thinking of colonist actors – squatters, lawyers, judges, business owners and politicians – determined to make the rich richer at all costs. Sentiments do not seem to change over time; similar arguments and roadblocks existed even in our early colonial past. Endless inquiries are toothless, reports are demonised as per virtue signalling, accusations are outrightly denied, policies are muddied and ineffectual, seemingly reasonable protests are attacked similarly to ‘virtue-signalling’ today, and political word-smithing to mask revolting actions.
Killing for Country is not an easy read, but it is an important one. Post the Voice outcome, it is especially galling and devasting to read of push-back, excuses and hyperbole used by the agitated establishment.