I'm so glad you found it a good book, BelleZora - I think it very good indeed, and I just wish that every Australian could read it and ponder on what it has to say. Sadly, there are still plenty of people who try to claim that such things didn't happen.
The good thing is that at least there are people writing about the past who are prepared to face up to what was done and to acknowledge it. One of the historians doing this is Henry Reynolds, and I thought you might be interested in a couple of passages from one of his books, called
This Whispering in our Hearts which is about the people who did speak out about the treatment of the Aboriginal people. These are from the Introduction:
Quote:
Unease about the morality of settlement has been apparent throughout the two centuries of European occupation of the Australian continent. In each generation people have expressed their concern about the ethics of colonisation, the incidence of racial violence, the taking of the land and the suffering, deprivation and poverty of Aboriginal society in the wake of settlement.
Some were so troubled by what they saw around them that they devoted themselves to the amelioration of Aboriginal suffering or to the denunciation of violence and brutality. In doing so they courted the anger, hostility and even the hatred of their contemporaries. They voiced the unspeakable, exposed carefully cloaked self-deception, dragged out hidden hypocrisies. For their pains they were seen as self-righteous, disturbing, dangerous, obsessive or mad. (Page xiv)
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Quote:
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Settler solidarity was not just comforting. It seemed necessary for survival. The shared guilt of the punitive expedition, the complicity in killing, bound participants together in close confederation. Dissenters who challenged the ways of the frontier were boycotted, bullied or banished. The pioneer Queensland grazier Ernest Thorn refused to allow a party of neighbouring settlers to use his boat to facilitate a nocturnal attack on a neighbouring Aboriginal camp. As a result he acquired a bad name which, he explained, 'followed me for many years, and rose up in judgement against me, in unexpected places, as a dangerous man.' His name was 'covered with opprobrium' and he was branded as a man 'who was false to his race, and unworthy of the confidence of decent white men.' (Page xvi)
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As we discussed in
Things Fall Apart, it takes a lot of courage to go against the majority.
And finally, in case you hadn't come across this bit of information, the title of the book refers to the Hawkesbury River of course, but also it is a quote from an anthropologist called W E H Stanner who referred to 'the secret river of blood' that was shed in the conflict between the settlers and the Aboriginals, and the silence about that shame in the way our history was taught to us. It's a powerful and chilling image.