Funciones con razón de cambio constante

fro« an early date (Durack. M. 1983:372-3. see also Willey, K. 1979:98).

the wild blacks got in the way, or in other words speared men and killed and harassed cattle, they would be relentlessly shot down. It was as simple and as brutal as that

(Broughton, G.W. 1965:53).

Buchanan developed a methodology of retaliation for stock killing in which camps were approached and fired upon, apparently taking care to kill without maiming the men while not harming women and

children. On the dispersal of the men his party would ride in and inspect the damage. Any spears found were destroyed. If he considered the action insufficient the gunmen would follow the Aborigines from camp to camp until he was satisfied (Buchanan, G. 1933:157-163). According to contemporary reports,

this activity was an integral part of stock-work in the first thirty years of settlement. Stockmen with a reputation for being ’hard on b l a c k s ’ were sought after, while some owners contracted Queensland

Aborigines to cull native people from a property (Willey, K. 1971:16,52). These patrols were, according to Buchanan, "the most urgent and the most trying of any work" on his Wave Hill (NT)

station (Buchanan, G. 1933:164). During the stage of initial contact that was a continuing process across the Kimberleys from the 1880s to the 1 9 3 0 s ; three forms of pacification were practised. The most devastating, the massacre of an entire

encampment followed by burning of the bodies, was usually practised by police parties composed of special constables sworn in for the occasion, though sometimes it was the work of individuals (Willey, K. 1971:16). Probably more common was

dispersal from the environs of pastoral stations in which adult males only were usually shot and women captured. Thirdly, a casual routine violence

A number of social and material conditions combined to shift the dependence of local groups to the new substitute ’water-holes’ of the white m a n ’s

homestead. Among these individual choices, often the result of social needs, it is possible to underestimate the degree of coercion required to discipline and retain productive workers. This could be the flogging or bashing of individuals

(Broughton, G.W. 1965:71,79. Willey, K. 1971:59- 60), or it could result in death,as in the

following example when a well-known station owner had received information from the Aboriginal camp that a young man had been threatening to spear him. Matt Savage recalls:

...Joe [the owner] was butchering a beast. He had it hung up on the gallus and he was chopping the brisket with an axe. He needed someone to hold the sides of the beast apart

and he called up this particular boy. . . . Joe

made a mighty swing with the axe, changed direction at the last moment, and chopped the b oy’s head right off in one stroke. He did not even bother to clean off the axe; just went back to cutting up the bullock

(Willey, K. 1971:15).

While this central element in the process of

settlement has been largely forgotten by Europeans, and even in the reminiscences of protagonists is couched in terms of justified retaliation against adult males, for t o d a y ’s Aboriginal population it is active in memory, and full of a brutality, that has largely been excised from White Australian history. In this respect the ’conspiracy of

silence’ observed by Commissioner Woods in 1926 (WA Parliament 1927 :vi ) and commented on by most

observers of the early years of Kimberley

settlement (Broughton, G.W. 1965:79, Durack. M. 1983:301) has its effect on the present. This silence marked the outback whites from their urban

cousins; it was the result of the ambivalence of state ideology and its representative, the police.3 The state, and its immediate representative the police force, were engaged in enforcing alien laws. The form in which dispossession appeared had to coincide with a developed ideology of justice, right, and legal process. The actual process of settler colonisation contradicted this, producing tension within the colonising forces. The effect has been for this central aspect of

European/Aboriginal relations to appear in our history only as occasional dark suggestions

(Buchanan, G. 1933:168, Nixon M. nd:28. Bolton, G.C. 1954:16) and therefore to enable Western Australian apologists to doubt its prevalence

(Biskup, P. 1973:40-1,55, Durack, M. 1983:301). In contrastfAboriginal recollections are lively and detailed and exist as a counter-reality inhibiting communication between the two.

At Yarrungga near Turkey Creek, Simon Drill stands on the site of the massacre of his p a r e n t ’s kinsmen and recalls:

They bin come this country and they bin round’em all the people gotta rifle, right round, waiting. Then they bin shoot’em now,

they bin shoot’em, shoot’em, shoot’em,

take’em. All the kid, all the piccaninny,

now, kid. Bash’em down [on] a tree, kill’em, chuck’em out like a dog, you know? And old woman, knock’em over, knock’em gotta axe or

something, put a rifle bullet

longa’em.... Well then these people bin

heap’em up, chuck’em like a plank of wood.

And get a wood, they bin, he never

letting’em go you know? Might be they run

3 On the one hand, the stealing of horses or cattle by one European from