"Forgotten War" Topic

Due for release in July, this is new work by leading Australian frontier relations/conflict historian, Henry Reynolds, author of, amongst others, 'Frontier', and 'The Other Side of the Frontier'.

Can you just remind me of this?

Me too

I'll post a review once I've got it, if you like.

Well, I've now read this book, so here are my thoughts on it.

As is always the case with Reynolds' work, there's a unifying thesis that drives it and ties together its disparate themes. In this case, he's launching a pre-emptive strike at the looming Gallipoli centenary due in two years, using the opportunity presented by the focusing of the nation's attention on things military-historical to argue his case that homegrown frontier conflict deserves to be memorialised on at least equal terms to this country's numerous international military excursions.

If, like myself, you've read any of his previous output, there will be much that's familiar, but it's all sequenced and deployed to good effect in support of his eloquently argued proposition. New elements relate to historiographical developments of the last couple of decades, such as the 'history wars' of the nineties, the considerable quantity of recently published research, and the acceptance by leading Australian military historians of the place of frontier conflict in the nation's martial annals.

Like almost all researchers of frontier conflict in this country, Reynolds has no background in military history, so common errors like the Martini-Henry rifle being described as a repeater persist. The minutiae of tactics and combat dynamics are not his concerns; he's painting the big picture. And like other social historians working in this sub-discipline, he draws no distinction between skirmishes and murders/massacres,and consequently makes no attempt to identify the shape or salient features of frontier fights. But then, even John Connor, the only writer thus far to approach the subject from a military history perspective, didn't focus his research any closer than 'operational' and 'grand tactical' considerations. As far as I know, my efforts in this direction are unique.

So, if you're looking for a detailed examination of the dynamics of frontier skirmishes you won't find it here, or, for that matter, anywhere else except in my own unpublished articles. Nevertheless, this is an important piece of work that makes its case cogently and convincingly, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened on Australia's advancing frontier of settlement during more than one hundred years of often bitter conflict.

There's another review on the Wikipedia military history project website. I thought I'd seen all the existing images of frontier skirmishing, but alongside the review is a watercolour of Burke and Wills supply party fighting Aborigines that's new to me. The style suggests that it was probably painted by a participant.

You can also listen to a podcast that Philip Adams conducted with Henry Reynolds on 22/7 on Radio National.

Correction: '… to a podcast of an interview that …'

Another point:

One area where I have to take issue with Reynolds is his discussion of the numbers of settler casualties. Once again he's let down by his unfamiliarity with the weapons of the frontier and their performance characteristics. As he points out, there's been a great deal of scholarly work done in this area, and estimates of the number killed have improved with each passing year. But because wounds weren't documented as reliably as deaths, arriving at a total for the overall number of casualties isn't amenable to the same degree of relative precision. However, to limply suggest, as he does when discussing total casualties for Queensland during the entire conflict period, 'It is estimated that 1500 settlers were killed and no doubt as many wounded', fails to account for the low lethality of Aboriginal weapons. They were mostly wooden, with spearheads made of stone, bone, or merely fire-hardened. It's a well established fact that anyone hit by one was several times more likely to be wounded than killed, so if 1500 is as accurate an estimate of the fatalities as is currently achievable, a figure of perhaps 10,000 for the Queensland casualty total isn't at all unreasonable.

This disproportion is borne out by clues in the literature, such as the observations of would-be settler John Macartney, who noted during a tour through the country west of Brisbane in 1856 in search of a property to purchase that almost every male settler he encountered bore scars from wounds inflicted by native weapons. Wounds usually weren't recorded, and minor wounds were so common as to be considered just another unremarkable hazard of pioneering.