Early Resistance

In the contact period we often opposed the European colonisers. Usually it was guerrilla warfare: resistance and attacks against a heavily armed invader. Our traditional, regional systems meant that our responses were local, against individual transgressors. Early colonial newspapers quickly labelled these tactics as ‘treacherous’ and colonial authorities declared martial law.

Pan-Aboriginal resistance was organised from the 1810s to 1840s. Nineteenth-century non-Indigenous historians and commentators described large-scale frontier conflict, rather than an occasional skirmish. In the late 1800s, we faced increasing numbers of British military forces, with their improved firepower and the raids of the Native Police.

At the same time lives were lost from disease and warfare, a situation exacerbated by our reduced access to shelter and food.

The colonisers and some settlers who followed often fought the war outside the law, though few were brought before the courts.

In the Torres Strait, armed seafarers were able to overwhelm some Islanders. In places, women were abducted, gardens raided and men co-opted for work. It was believed by the Islanders that the missionaries could protect them from the violent acts of foreign seamen.

Protection Acts

Protection Acts were passed in every state following Victoria’s Aboriginal Protection Act in 1869. Succeeding amendments rendered these Acts increasingly restrictive. They controlled the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and operated until the second half of the twentieth century. In 1915, a new law gave the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines the right to assume control and custody of Aboriginal children and to remove them to ‘such care and control as it thinks best’. It became the Aborigines Welfare Board in 1940. Highly controlling, the Board offered Aboriginal people less welfare and protection than had existed previously.

When the Honourable John Douglas, the first Government Resident in the Torres Strait, died in 1904, the Chief Protector placed the Islanders under the same controls as other Aboriginal people. Queensland’s native affairs policy was still emerging and two elements were extended instruction, and social isolation. The Torres Strait Islander Act 1939 followed, with further legislation in 1965, 1971–79, 1984 and 1985.

Excerpt fromThe Little Red Yellow Black Book by Bruce Pascoe with AIATSIS.