Aboriginal 'Strategic' Victory' etc.

[Leigh Metford]

In a recent slightly derailed thread on this board (currently locked) a certain 'excitable' member posed, in his own inimitable fashion, a couple of questions relating to conflict on the colonial Australian frontier. Although those questions have been thoroughly discussed and responded to on other online fora, I thought it would be worthwhile reiterating them here for members of this forum who might be new to the subject, and - I hope- to put this 'controversy to rest once and for all.

This message is rhetorical; I'm posting it purely to inform and educate. I'm categorically not looking to provoke the aforementioned member into another pointless round of online combat. In fact, to prevent this thread degenerating into just that, I invite the site administrator to permanently lock it (if that's possible) as soon as this message has been posted.

BTW, the reference I made in that other thread to the attitude of a proportion of Australian hobbyists was historical; I've noticed over the years that some of the most strident 'objectors' seem to have softened their position, indicating to me that they've been listening and thinking, and now see the whole subject from a more reasonable perspective. Let's face it: in the end we ARE talking about playing with toy soldiers.

On the question of Aboriginal 'strategic' victory, while I have no intention of combing through my entire frontier conflict library for data, I'm happy to quote from one authoritative text, the University of Queensland Press publication ,'Race Relations in Colonial Queensland', by Evans, Saunders and Cronin, a book that can in no way be accused of shrinking from the truth of the treatment of non-whites by whites in colonial Australia. On page 42 of that book appears the following general statement: 'Though the general outcome of this "trial" between spears and rifles was undoubtedly a foregone conclusion, Aboriginal resistance was determined and powerful enough in many areas to drive white settlement back temporarily. Indeed, on all frontiers in Queensland, one finds evidence of labourers deserting their employment, of stations being abandoned, of sheep or cattle driven off, not in ones and twos, but in hundreds, even thousands.' It then goes on to cite specific dates and locations, such as the Darling Downs in the 1840s, where 'a resistance campaign led by one Multuggerah ... led to ... the desertion of properties.' In the Warrego country 'settlement along the Condamine, Maranoa, and Lower Macintyre was thwarted for three years by guerilla forays and "began to retreat". 'Settlement of the Burnett District, begun in 1842, had to be abandoned the following year due to aboriginal raids.' I've also read - I can't recall in which of my books at the moment -   that later in the century, portions of the country around the Gulf of Carpentaria were abandoned and subsequently avoided for as long as two decades. While these examples are confined to Queensland, the phenomenon itself wasn't, so for instance, in Victoria there was the case of George Faithful and his squatter neighbours, who in 1838 fled their properties in the north-east of the colony after a period of conflict culminated in the so-called Faithful Massacre of seven white men. There are other examples, but I think I've answered the question adequately already.

Then there was the false dichotomy of mounted men armed with repeaters versus tribesmen armed with fire-hardened spears. Overlooking the fact that Aborigines also used stone and bone spear-heads, and adapted European manufactured materials such as glass, ceramics and metal to the same role, I've specifically stated elsewhere that, unless representing firearm-equipped warriors such as Jandamarra's band or fictional equivalents, I see little point in playing frontier scenarios set later than the 1870s because repeaters became widely available to settlers by the 1880s, and they'd be too one-sided - or in game terms, very difficult to balance.

While I've only managed to find less than a dozen detailed accounts of skirmishes, there are many more descriptions and references of up to a couple of paragraphs, and when all the evidence is considered collectively a reasonably accurate picture of the pattern and shape of those skirmishes can be formed. It's clear that Aboriginal modes of fighting did change in response to this very different form of conflict, and new tactics were developed to cope with settler weapons technology and tactics. Attempts at envelopment, and engaging in prolonged stand-up fights in which substantial casualties were suffered, were never features of traditional tribal warfare, yet they happened frequently on the frontier.

The proprietor of Blaze Away has always insisted that his Aboriginal warrior figures sold well (which makes their deletion all the more puzzling); a claim which, if true, augurs well for anyone launching any superior set of sculpts.

On the question of tastefulness, it would be difficult to name an armed conflict of any duration that hasn't been attended with atrocity and massacre to one degree or another, so I fail to understand why some wargamers adopt the morally conflicted position of anathematizing particular conflicts as somehow more distasteful than others. The Romans had a deliberate policy of massacring and enslaving the inhabitants of captured cities, Ghengis Khan's Mongol hordes left a massive swathe of death and devastation in their wake, the imperialist lackeys of King Leopold killed as many as ten million defenceless Africans in the Congo and mutilated countless others, the Germans and their allies murdered hundreds of thousands of Russian and Jewish civilians during WW2, and even the supposedly professional, disciplined European armies of the mid-18th century left many civilian victims along their lines of march - and yet figure manufacturers make figures for all these armies, and scores, hundreds or thousands of wargamers happily buy them, paint them, and use them on the tabletop. In this hobby, no matter what period you play, if you want to sleep at night it's essential to be able to separate the combat from the atrocities; an ability that most wargamers seem to possess, although individuals who have a personal aversion to a particular conflict, whether rational or morally consistent or not, can always avoid any psychological discomfort simply by not playing it.

To my mind, knowing that, like so many other indigenous resisters against colonialism, Aboriginal warriors often fought with determination despite the odds against them, and sometimes won at the tactical and 'strategic' level (in the terms of victory as it can be defined for this specific historical and geographical context), to not give their struggle equal tabletop representation to other native peoples is to dishonour the memory of their resistance.         







     


 

 

       

[former user]

 

[Leigh Metford]

I'd intended that the OP be a stand-alone response and 'final word', and I have no desire to revive this thread as a dialogue, so this is a one-off supplementary announcement.

There's a new frontier conflict article online: 'A Different kind of War?, by ethnohistorian Raymond Kerkhove, from the University of Queensland, in which he plays military historian, proposing that a number of tribes in southern and central Queensland issued a collective 'declaration of war', or if you prefer, 'went on the warpath', from the early 1840s to at least the mid 1850s.

Inevitably, given his training, there are some faults in the article: like all academics of his ilk, and unlike we who know better, he equates casualties to fatalities; Aboriginal weapons were of low lethality, so for every settler killed several were wounded, and consequently the overall casualty disparity between the two sides was not as great as it's usually represented as being; he fails to recognise the importance of 'the code of the frontier' in suppressing reports and accounts of skirmishes, and thus almost certainly underestimates the level of violence; he compares the Native Mounted Police to the US cavalry in the Indian Wars, when a better parallel can be seen in the Indian Scouts - particularly the Apache Scouts.

Despite these flaws he makes a persuasive case, and insofar as it goes (there's no analysis of combat dynamics and minor tactics such as I've attempted), it's a fascinating and revealing piece that's essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of frontier conflict in colonial Australia.   

[Leigh Metford]

Sorry, that article is actually entitled 'A Different Mode of War?'