Customer Reviews

Blood on the Wattle

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This book was a savage indictment of the white settlement of Australia. The details of the massacres are so unrelenting as to render the reader numb with disbelief that such behaviour could be perpetrated by so-callled civilised man.

My only criticism of this treatise is that Mr Elder fails to accept that the very same reasons that made the Aboriginal people innocent also applied to the perpetrators of the massacres. A white person taught that to steal a loaf of bread could lead to 7 years transportation was unlikely to react well to an aboriginal group taking and slaughtering cattle for food. It was often a case of the brutalised doing the brutalising.

Mr Elder also brushes off the (admittedly extremely rare) massacres of whites by aboriginals as being basically "brought upon themselves" even in cases where he has no particular evidence (ie when the settlers had just arrived and were building their camp). Horrible reprisals on the parts of other whites does not reduce the horror of the original act.

Don't get me wrong. These really are minor complaints. Overall, this is a well written book and the inclusion of previously unrecorded massacres from aboriginal oral histories is an important addition to what would otherwise be a list of the stories that white Australia recorded, which were of course written mostly by the people who perpetrated and therefore were apologists for the original acts.

When I was in high school I was shocked and inspired by "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". It took another 20 years to find the Australian equivalent.

I bought this during a recent trip home. The presentation is sparse, and much of the evidence is anecdotal, but the mass of evidence is overwhelming. Australians slaughtered the Aboriginals in defiance of ill conceived laws. Although the current generation didn't perpetrate the crimes, race relations in Australia continue to be haunted by the shadows of these events. Elder's introduction rams home that time doesn't negate these events.

Please read this.