The Frontiers of Knowledge by A. C. Grayling

Author:A. C. Grayling [Grayling, A. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241980873
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Reynolds argues that the frontier war was constant and ubiquitous, that every year for a hundred and forty years, from the beginning of settlement until the 1920s, people were dying violently in remote parts of Australia – ‘remote’ changing its meaning over time – most of whom were Aboriginals, though a significant number of settlers died too. His original estimate had been that twenty thousand Aboriginals were killed in these conflicts, but later said that this was too low ‘even for Queensland alone’. Newspapers, letters, and other documents show that there was widespread awareness of the conflict right into the early twentieth century, but, by the time Reynolds was a young history lecturer in Queensland in the 1960s, the textbook he taught from contained nothing at all about Aboriginals – the word did not even occur in the index. Yet in the Queensland of that time tense race relations and conflict between whites and Aboriginals were commonplace.

A key point for Reynolds is that the conflict between settlers and Aboriginals was a war in the full sense of this term, a war fought in Australia that was a war about Australia. It was a war about the ownership and control of the best land in the country; it was a war about sovereignty. He writes, ‘This was our Great War. What could be more important than the ownership, the control, of a whole continent? And it was a war of global importance, because it was a war over ownership of one of the world’s continents.’11

Reynolds’s argument about Australia could, mutatis mutandis, be applied to the United States but multiplied many times over. The longest war ever fought by the United States was the war against the Native American nations as western expansion, fuelled by repeated gold rushes and the coming of the railroads, invaded the home territories of Shoshone, Cheyenne, Sioux, and other peoples on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains. In the south-west, in New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada, the Comanche and Apache tribes resisted the settlers; when the United States acquired Florida from Spain the result was a series of bitter struggles with the Seminole people.

The period between 1860 and 1890 was said by Dee Brown, a leading historian of the Native Americans, to be when

the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed and out of that time came virtually all the great myths of the American West – tales of fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms, and homesteaders. Only occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more often than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man. The Indian was the dark menace of the myths, and even if he had known how to write in English, where would he have found a printer or a publisher?12

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