After meeting up with friends in a very green Alice Springs we set out on the 15 hour drive along the Tamani Road in Warlpiri country to Lajamanu.
The history of this landscape is that of the Frontier wars involving a series of conflicts over 140 years (1788 to 1934) that were fought between Indigenous Australians and mainly British settlers. Denialism, the failure to acknowledge the existence of armed resistance to white settlement and the widespread frontier conflict, constituted a ‘great Australian silence’ in Australian history. This politics of ethnic amnesia started to shift in the 1970s, when it was acknowledged that Australians had been engaged in the intentional physical killing of groups of people because they were those people, and forcibly removed children from their group with the intention of ‘transforming’ them into members of another group.
Central Australia was one of the last frontiers in the European conquest of Australia and, when administered by South Australia in the 19th century (between 1860 and 1895) 40 per cent of the population in the Alice Springs region, were mostly shot in the name of ‘dispersal’. Frontier massacres were erratic, episodic, sporadic, from a dozen to ten dozen dead at a time, more eliminationist than simply punitive in intent — for stealing livestock or spearing cattle ranchers, bushmen, miners and men who took Aboriginal women.
Coniston i
n the Tanami desert was its western outpost in the European conquest of the Northern Territory. T
he conflict was caused by the pastoralist’s attempts to occupy Warlpiri land and then to secure that land from the Warlpiri. This conflict lasted until the 1930s, and it was centred around the Coniston massacre, in an area in and around Coniston Station, just north of Yuendumu. Coniston is the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous Australians. It was a series of punitive raids that occurred over a number of weeks as police parties (ie., vigilantes under the command of a white police officer, Constable William Murray) killed indiscriminately to establish white Australia by killing over 200 or more Walpiri, Anmatjere, Kaytete and Allyawar people.
Termite mound, Tanami
In 1928 Central Australia experienced a severe drought that reduced the ground water. The original owners of the land did what they had done for thousands of years and gravitated to their ancient water sources, mainly in the form of soaks.For the pastoralists, the lack of water came at a crucial time as they were carving out vast tracts of land to run cattle. Conflicts between Aboriginal people and white settlers resulted. The Aboriginal people were angry as they watched their waterholes being destroyed by cattle, fences being erected and white men taking their women as wives or servants. Their law, customs and traditions were being violated.
The new pastoralists saw that the Aboriginal people were competing with their cattle for the precious water. They considered their cattle to be more important than the Walpiri people. This was a frontier society determined to maintain its whiteness, determined to put an end to Aboriginality, and ensure the erasure of the Aboriginal presence, one way or another. Aborigines as a distinct group would disappear.
The Long Road to the North 