‘Pale Death … around our Footprints Springs’:1 Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier from State and Private Exterminatory Practices

Speculating about genocide: The Queensland frontier 1859–1897

“…The exercise undertaken by Evans and Ørsted‐Jensen proceeds in what they claim is an absence of comprehensive records, a fact they attribute to a deliberate destruction of archives (Evans & Ørsted‐Jensen, 2021, p. 148). Prior to their work there had been other occasional allusions to the absence or destruction of records pertaining to the Native Police and frontier conflict.…”

“…Drawing on Richards' systematic compilation of Native Police records in the Queensland State Archives, Ørsted‐Jensen in 2011 published claims that the survivals were in fact so meagre as to imply more than bureaucratic negligence. Subsequently he and Evans have recovered what they now claim to be documentary evidence that the records were destroyed, ‘possibly late in 1939’ (Evans & Ørsted‐Jensen, 2021, p. 148). The source for this claim is the thrice‐repeated report by a popular north Queensland journalist, Alex Vennard, well known for his bush yarns and other ephemera published under the pen‐name Bill Bowyang.…”

“…In reply I was informed such records had been destroyed.’ Vennard's story, as Evans and Ørsted‐Jensen note, was subsequently repeated in a couple of his later columns in 1943 and 1946. On the basis of this single source, which refers only to one location, the historians establish this as an ‘intelligence… leaving little doubt that this exchange referred to the deliberate destruction of the Queensland Native Police files’ (Evans & Ørsted‐Jensen, 2021, p. 148). While their account concedes a modicum of doubt about the infallibility of the source, others appear to have followed them to assert the destruction of records as a verified historical fact.…”

“…This figure of 66,680 deaths, including both Aborigines and settlers, represented by them as ‘our findings’ (Evans & Ørsted‐Jensen, 2021, p. 161) rather than a very conditional estimate, has quickly become established as authoritative, cited in both academic analysis and media commentary. In this article, we examine the assumptions that enable such calculations to be made, raising questions about their reliability.…”

“…These extrapolations lead them to propose in their latest publication (a chapter published in a volume on genocide of Indigenous peoples in settler societies), a figure of 66,680 Aborigines and settlers killed across the extended period of colonial settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. This figure includes an estimated total of 41,040 ‘Aborigines killed during 3420 official frontier dispersals [ie by Native Police] across almost forty years of conflict’ (Evans & Ørsted‐Jensen, 2021, p. 154). This figure builds on an earlier and lower estimate of 24,000 deaths at the hands of Native Police, published originally in an article by Evans in 2010, supplemented by further data presented as a conference paper in 2014, and accessible online at the research sharing platform SSRN since 2015 (Evans, 2010; Evans & Ørsted–Jensen, 2014).…”