“The Herald has a long and proud history of telling the Australian story. But on Myall Creek, the truth is we failed dismally.”

On 9 June 2023, Sydney Morning Herald editor Bevan Shields apologised for the historic coverage by his paper’s predecessor the Sydney Herald of the 1838 massacre of Wirrayaraay people. Shields acknowledged that the Herald slandered the victims and campaigned on behalf of the murderers, and that it published exonerating information that it almost certainly knew to be false.

The apology noted that other colonial newspapers pursued “a much more respectful view about the trials and the notion Aboriginal people were entitled to the same legal protections as British subjects” (Shields 2023). That was certainly true, given that the Herald distinguished itself from its rivals with explicit calls for genocide. “The aboriginal [sic] of my native country,” explained one of the paper’s correspondents a few months after the massacre, “are the most degenerate, despicable and brutal race of beings in existence […] they will, and must, become extinct […]” (Sydney Herald 1838b). Its distinctive viciousness did not, however, lead to the Herald’s isolation. As Rebecca Wood argues, the exterminationist rhetoric came from a publication “deeply embedded in the politics of the emerging frontier” (Wood 2009:67.5).

Shield’s apology claims the paper failed to “tell the Australian story”. But that’s not correct, either. Rather, the Herald’s campaign on behalf of racist mass killers matters precisely because it did tell “the Australian story” — that is, it provided ideological justification for the destruction of Indigenous society and the establishment of a colonial settler state, with a rhetoric that still resonates today.

The Myall Creek murders took place on 10 June 1838 near the Gwydir River in northern New South Wales. After an intensification of frontier violence in which hundreds were killed on and near Wirrayaraay country, some 35 Aboriginal people — the majority of whom were women, old men and infants — sought shelter near a station belonging to Henry Dangar. The squatter John Fleming, leading a party of convict and ex-convict stockmen — found them, led them to a nearby gully and hacked to death all but one woman, whom the men repeatedly raped. Later, they returned to dismember and burn the corpses (Tedeschi 2017).

News of the atrocity — grisly even by colonial standards — eventually reached the governor, George Gipps. The investigation ordered by Gipps and his attorney general John Plunkett culminated in the arrest of eleven of the stockmen, though not Fleming. An initial trial acquitted all accused; a second found seven men guilty. Despite widespread opposition from settlers, they were executed. Fleming, the ringleader, escaped (Withycombe 2018).

As Wood notes, the massacre occurred during a pivotal time for colonisation in NSW, “fifty years since the landing of the First Fleet and only two years before the end of transportation” (2009:67.3). Booming land values had driven the rapid colonial expansion behind the renewed conflict with Indigenous people. Yet the speculative bubble would soon burst, with the price of wool — the colony’s main export commodity — collapsing in 1838.

The economic uncertainty exacerbated a longstanding crisis about the legality of the whole colonial project. In North America, the British established that land could only be obtained by Crown Purchase from the continent’s native peoples. Though regularly flouted in practice, the requirement provided colonisation with a jurisprudential fig leaf. Accordingly, James Cook carried explicit orders to obtain “the consent of the natives” before he claimed possession of any inhabited land (Frost 1981:518).

The First Fleet, however, sailed under far more ambiguous instructions. Commander Phillip was told to “proceed to the cultivation of the land”; he was also ordered to ensure “all our subjects … live in amity and kindness” with Indigenous people, even as the cultivation he depended on necessarily dispossessed them (1787:13–14).

The second of the injunctions neither prevented the colony’s growth nor fostered its amity. But, by the 1830s, the contradictions of imperial policy had attracted renewed attention from Britain. Popular disgust at chattel slavery, spurred by multiple revolts of enslaved people, led to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Inspired by a new evangelical humanitarianism, politicians wondered openly as to the basis of the NSW settlement. In 1837, for instance, a Select Committee of the House of Commons noted that colonists had taken land “without any reference to the possessors and actual occupants … It might be presumed that the native inhabitants of any land have an incontrovertible right to their own soil: a plain and sacred right, however, which seems not to have been understood.”

Within New South Wales, similar issues emerged. In 1827, a court judging a soldier charged with murdering an Aboriginal man heard argument that Europeans lacked jurisdiction over Indigenous people, “the free occupants of the demesne or soil”. Similarly, in an 1835 case in which an Aboriginal man called Lego’me faced charges of robbing a settler, his lawyer insisted that, because the colonists settled on Indigenous land, “in point of strictness and analogy to our law, we were bound to obey their laws, not they to obey ours”.

The claims failed but the arguments hinted at the cracks between jurisprudence and reality, fissures that the Myall Creek atrocity widened. Before their execution, the seven murderers admitted the killings but claimed they acted “solely in defence of their masters’ property, that they were not aware that in destroying aboriginals [sic] they were violating the laws, or that it could take cognizance of their having done so, as it had (according to their belief) been so frequently done in the colony before.” The absence of a legal foundation for “what had been so frequently done” constituted a potential threat to all colonial property. The squatters, in particular, feared that their occupancy of great tracts of land — only partially normalised by the licencing system of 1836 — might not withstand closer scrutiny.

Ward Stephens, the proprietor and leader writer of the Herald, came to their assistance. Himself a squatter, with large holdings in northwestern New South Wales, he used the paper — by far the most significant of the colonial publications — to re-state the moral, political and legal claim for settlement (Wood 2009:67.5).

His strategy necessitated the rebuttal of even the most moderate claims for Indigenous rights to land. As humanitarians called for state-funded “Aboriginal Protectors” to deter frontier depredations, the Herald insisted that settlers owed Indigenous people nothing. Stephens argued that any compensation (no matter how limited) implicitly acknowledged prior Aboriginal ownership — and as such threatened the colony’s existence.

“If,” said Stephens, “we can show no title from [Indigenous people] to occupy any portion of those lands […] then it is clear that we are trespassers upon the soil, and that the Aborigines have a right to drive us away by force.”

To guard against the possibility, he disseminated ideas widely circulated in Europe for centuries but only beginning to crystalise into the doctrine known much later in the nineteenth century as terra nullius.

In 1819, a dispute between NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie and the Supreme Court judge Barron Field had raised the question of the colony’s legal status. Macquarie claimed the right to level taxes on settlers; Field responded that the crown’s representative could exercise such a right only in territory that had been conquered. A colony, Field said, did not fit the description. The legal authorities in Britain agreed, arguing that NSW was “not acquired by conquest or cession but taken […] as desert and uninhabited, and subsequently colonized from this country” (Ford and Clemens, 2023:30).

Similarly, in 1822, the courts ruled that new governor Thomas Brisbane, could not make law by proclamation, since the country had been “acquired neither by conquest nor cession, but by the mere occupation of a desert or uninhabited land”. Twelve years later, Chief Justice Francis Forbes settled a dispute pertaining to the governor’s accounting obligations by referring to “His Majesty’s subjects settling an uninhabited country” (Banner 2005:123).

Such cases pertained primarily to rights and responsibilities among colonists. The Herald, however, spelled out the implications for Indigenous people. “The British nation constituted the first occupants of an unbroken soil”, it declared in 1839, “and the fact that savages roamed over it in no way invalidates its right of possession”.

Field and other legal authorities explicitly described colonisation in terms of Britain settling on “uninhabited” territory. The later term terra nullius (“empty land”) expressed the same comforting fantasy of Europeans taking control of a continent without people. But, in the 1830s, the Herald could not base its argument on a supposed lack of previous inhabitants. Obviously, the need to justify the treatment of Indigenous people presupposed their existence.

Fortunately for Stephens, the argument underpinning Field’s judgment did not require a literal absence of people. Instead, Field — and following him, Stephens — drew on theorists like Locke, Grotius and Pufendorf to connect the ownership of land with labour.

“Land,” the Herald explained, “is the property of those who first bestow labour upon him, just as a wild animal is the property of him who domesticates it” (1838c). The paper acknowledged that native people lived in “New Holland” (indeed, its editorials began from that basis) but claimed they had not shaped the country through labour. As a result, the land did not and could them belong to them. Their lack of prior title meant that colonists had not dispossessed anyone. Rather, whites were the first owners of the continent.

The argument neatly resolved the problems facing the squatters, providing a jurisprudential foundation for the status quo. But what gave any rhetorical force to the strange assertion that Indigenous people did not labour? At face value, the claim contradicted the settlers’ own Bible, in which The Almighty (a personage regularly appearing in Stephens’s editorials) decreed: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food”. If the scripture recognised the ubiquity of human labour, so, too, did common sense. As a species, humans survive by interacting with the environment. People must find food, clothe themselves, create shelters. It is on that basis that Marx defines labour as “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature”: our nature requires us, in all locales and in all times, to interact with the world around us (Marx 1981:283).

The continent later called Australia, like every other inhabited place, bore the marks of such interactions. “The Australian landscape at the time of British invasion in the 18th century,” write contemporary geographers Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Tegan Hall and Andreas Nicholas Alexandra, “was a heavily constructed one — the product of millennia of active maintenance by Aboriginal Australians” (Fletcher et al 2021). Over tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal people had developed a complex system to manage, and thus change, the land. Most obviously, they carried out regular burnings to thin forests, encourage new growth, and provide food for animals, in a “deliberate enhancement of the landscape” (Paterson 2018:6).

The colonists could not help but encounter signs of such Indigenous “enhancement”. For instance, Captain James Cook witnessed fires all along the east coast, with their prevalence leading him to write of a “continent of smoke”. Nevertheless, Cook still described the land as “in the pure state of Nature, the Industry of Man [having] had nothing to do with any part of it” (Beaglehole 1955:397).

Likewise, when Phillip’s men first disembarked, the deputy judge advocate David Collins wrote about taking “possession of Nature … in her simplest, purest garb”, even though the lush gully in which the British landed bore the marks of Indigenous burning. Collings, however, described only a “stillness and tranquillity”, describing a place in which “the voice of labour” had not spoken until European arrival (Collins 2021).

The British blindness to Indigenous labour might, perhaps, be attributed to ignorance. The tradition on which the Herald drew rested on the idea that agriculture “by a regular connexion and consequence, introduced and established the idea of a more permanent property in the soil than had previously been received and adopted” (1838e). By contrast, Indigenous connection with country manifested through customs such as burning and fish trapping that were very different from European land management, so much so that debates as to whether traditional Aboriginal practices should be described as “farming” continue to rage today (Pascoe 2018; Sutton and Walshe 2021; Keen 2021).

Yet the Herald’s arguments about labour and property did not rest on claims about the “strangeness” of Indigenous society. Rather, they centred on its familiarity.

Less than a year after the Myall Creek killings, the paper argued that:

this vast country was to [the natives of New Holland] a common — they bestowed no labor upon the land — their ownership, their right, was nothing more than that of the Emu or the Kangaroo. They bestowed no labor upon the land and that — and that only — it is which gives a right to property in it. Where, we ask, is the man endowed with even a modicum of reasoning powers, who will assert that this great continent was ever intended by the Creator to remain an un-productive wilderness? Yet what else was it — what would it have remained, but for the labor of civilized man?

The editorial justified dispossession by identifying Indigenous land as “a common”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “common” refers to “a piece of open land available to a community and allowing traditional rights such as grazing animals, collecting wood or turf for fuel, fishing, etc.” In England, such communal rights probably dated back to the collapse of Roman Britain and the arrival of Anglo-Saxon settlers. Until the extensive land privatisations (or “enclosures”) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they existed all throughout England, with a considerable proportion of the population — “commoners” — living through some manner of co-operative land management (Angus 2023:19).

Stephens’s description of “New Holland” as a “commons” might seem odd. The codification of the English commons derived from feudal hereditary privilege. Peasants were not mobile; they were tied both to the land and to a specific lord, to whom they owed (and in principle from whom they received) certain obligations. By contrast, Aboriginal people lived in small bands that occupied certain territories but moved across them regularly. Their society was radically egalitarian, without the fixed castes or innate hierarchies central to feudalism.

But the argument made by the Herald pertained less to what people did than to how they did it. On the English commons, men and women produced goods for themselves or for their neighbours. They rarely generated commodities. They laboured, wholly or in part, outside market relations, governed more by the rhythms of the natural world than the cycles of commerce.

That was what Stephens saw in “New Holland”. Tribes bartered with each other for particular items but they did not rely on trade for survival. They sustained themselves on their own country. The egalitarianism of Indigenous culture meant that, even more than the English commoners, Aboriginal people controlled their own labour. Markets played little role in their lives; they did not exchange labour power as a commodity.

In England, from as early as the fifteenth century, landowners had realised the emerging textile industry provided extraordinary opportunities for enrichment. In response to the seemingly inexhaustible demand for wool, they sought to turn their fields over to sheep, which meant displacing the men and women who relied on the commons for survival. Marx described the dispossession as “primitive accumulation” (using the word “primitive” in its sense of “original”): an initial act of violence that birthed both capital and proletariat by creating a population dependent upon selling labour power to rural or industrial capitalists. The enclosures provided much of the conceptual apparatus for the Herald’s defence of white settlement in New South Wales.

Throughout the feudal period, the English poor had provisioned themselves on land over which they exercised customary rights. That included so-called “wastes”: areas too small or awkwardly located for conventional agriculture but sufficient to graze animals, gather berries, collect firewood and so on. Though useful — even essential — to people, they did not contribute to the expansion of value. As capitalism developed, the authorities came to believe that, as Jesse Goldstein says, “it was the Nation’s responsibility to subdue these lands, along with the people living upon them, in order to make them profitable” (2013:363). As a consequence, “by the turn of the nineteenth century, distinctions between forest lands, waste lands, meadows, common fields, fens, etc — all of the myriad commons and wastes, were more or less discarded, and collapsed into a general category of unused or inefficiently used lands, interchangeably called waste or commons” (2013:366).

The Herald deployed the same terminology for Indigenous land, explaining:

The British people found a portion of the globe in a state of waste — they took possession of it; and they had a perfect right to do so, under the Divine authority, by which man was commanded to go forth and people, and till the land […] The abstract rights of the Aboriginal inhabitants, who never made any use of the land, except to rove over its length and breadth, and to subsist upon the herbs and wild animals which it produced in a state of nature, does not enter into the present question: which is the right of the British nation to the soil, having been the first to take possession of it as a vast waste, and the consequent right of the nation to dispose of it (1839).

Like the British commoners, Indigenous people clearly did “make use” of the land. They lived in a use-value society, tending their country to encourage the animals and plants they required. The Herald, however, understood “productivity” in capitalist terms, with use values significant only insofar as they generated profit.

Again, the argument derived its terms from the history of enclosures.

In 1813, Thomas Davis from England’s newly formed Board of Agriculture had declared that “common fields may be called the worst of all wastes” because, even though they had been cultivated, it had been done “in a defective manner” — that is to say, without the commodified labour power on which profit depended. “Common fields,” he insisted, “can never be cultivated with any improvement to the land, or serious advantage to the occupier” (Davis 1813:103). The commons stood in the way of the wage labour that capitalism required. As Christopher Hill argues, the population “fought desperately to avoid the abyss of wage slavery … [and] the stultifying drudgery of those who had become cogs in someone else’s machine” (1974:237). Everywhere, people refused to abandon their autonomy and work for wages until the expropriation of the land on which they self-provisioned gave them no other choice.

The capitalists and their apologists openly advocated enclosure as necessary to make people work. In Middlesex, John Middleton explained that even a modicum of land “gives [commoners] an improper bias, and inculcates a desire to live, from that time forward, without labour, or at least with as little as possible” (Griffin 2023:13). John Billingsley made the same point in Somerset, where the common allowed the poor to acquire “a habit of indolence. Quarter, half and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting” (Angus 2023:178).

In the struggle against the English commons, the attacks on “wastes” thus became a simultaneous assault on the land (for not being farmed by wage labourers) and the people (for not working for a wage), with enclosure advocated to improve both (Goldstein 2013:368). As early as 1664, John Evelyn’s pioneering tract on forestry Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber declared enclosure “the most likely expedient to civilize” people he described as “wild and poor”, “clamorous and rude” and lacking “due obedience” (1776:262). Discussing Berkshire in 1813, William Mayor complained that “wherever there are large wastes, and particularly near forests, the lazy industry and beggarly independence of the lower orders of people, who enjoy commons, is a source of misery to themselves, and of loss to the community”. Enclosure, by contrast, would force them to “employ their time in productive labour, which is now so frequently wasted on objects … incompatible with their duty” (Griffin 2023:14).

In such passages, rhetorical parallels between enclosure and colonisation emerged again and again. EP Thompson writes of how:

The same improving mind-set, whether in Old England or in New, found reprehensible the lack of useful productive labour, whether on the ill-governed forest or waste or in the Indians’ hunting grounds. In the English cottager and “the wild Indian” alike there was seen a degrading cultural submission to a picaresque, desultory or vagrant mode of livelihood. “Forests and great Commons,” John Bellers wrote, “make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians […] ”. Commons were “a hindrance to Industry, and […] Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence” (Thompson 1993:165).

As Thompson suggests, such passages adopt the language of the frontier, with English land worked collectively dubbed “wilderness”, and the people dependent upon it dismissed as “savage”, “as wild and in as rough a state as the country they dwell in”, “a mischievous race of people […] ruined for want of an enclosure” (Griffin 2023:14; Neeson 1993:32).

The scholar Carl J Griffin describes enclosure as a form of internal colonisation, with the concept of terra nullius perfected through a dialectic between expropriations at home and abroad. The long war against the English commons provided, he says, the ideological tools necessary for settlers elsewhere to “discredit and debase indigenous peoples; deny their agency and ability to manage the space and its resources; and make assertions that [their] inability to make the land productive […] is evidence of being “backward” (Griffin 2023:19).

This veneer of improving paternalism notwithstanding, in 1771, the agricultural propagandist Arthur Young had blurted out the purpose of English enclosures. “Everyone but an idiot,” he said, “knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious” (Perelman 2000:98). The relationship between immiseration and wage labour led Young and his ilk to celebrate places that could not sustain people, with one eighteenth-century pamphleteer explaining that he could not “conceive a greater curse upon a body of people than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate requited or admitted little care for raiment or covering” (Perelman 2000:102).

In NSW, the unalienated labour of Indigenous people created precisely such abundance. Cook noted that the Aboriginal men and women he met “seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this, in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no Superfluities” (Perelman 2000:276). His description hints at the extraordinary achievement of Indigenous land management, which created a sufficiency sustainable over tens of thousands of years. But the logic of enclosure turned the satisfaction of human needs into a manifestation of savagery.

In 1832, a correspondent to the Sydney Herald styling himself “A Bushman” explained how, for “the native of this country”:

the facility of obtaining his food by the invigorating and gratifying exertions of hunting and fishing — his independence of clothing, from the mildness of the climate — his innate indolence, and his ignorance of, and contempt for, almost every comfort and convenience — present the greatest obstacles to his civilization. It is not, therefore, surprising that the first indications of improvement should be seen in those parts of the country, where the congregation of white inhabitants has visibly decreased the means of independent subsistence to the blacks, by substituting corn fields, and herds of cattle, for forests abounding in kangaroo; and where the exciting a desire for clothing and other luxuries, has produced new wants, which can only be gratified by fresh exertions. There you will find many of the blacks, who gain their subsistence, for several weeks together, by their labour in the field and in the house; and although this number is comparatively small, and the habit intermittent, yet a half-domesticated attachment is formed to the spot, and to the person who employs them — they return again and again to their labour, and eagerly bargain for its price (Sydney Herald 1831–1842).

The remarkable ability of Indigenous society to sustain itself over thousands of years thus served as evidence of inferiority. For the “Bushman”, the immiseration of Indigenous people became, not an unfortunate by-product of white settlement, but a desirable outcome, necessary to induce the wage labour on which civilisation depended.

On a similar basis, the Herald championed white supremacy with familiar arguments about enclosure improving both land and people. “We contend”, it argued, “that the right of occupying waste lands, and of subjugating uncivilised men, rests solely upon the condition of rendering the one productive, and of humanising the other. Then, how can these great objects be accomplished, if it is not conceded that the civilised man has a right to bring a barbarian under subjection?” (1839). Even the sinister rhetoric of “subjection” echoed earlier campaigns within Britain. In 1803, Sir John Sinclair from the Board of Agriculture celebrated enclosure as a global war, in which conflicts abroad reinforced those at home and vice versa. “We have begun,” he said:

another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country […] Why should we not attempt a campaign also against our great domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the kingdom? […] let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.

Sinclair’s “improvement” universally required a “yoke” because the imposition of wage labour depended on immiseration.

In 1834, just four years before the Herald’s editorial, Alexis de Tocqueville observed the riches of England’s wealthy — and then noted that “one-sixth of the inhabitants of this flourishing kingdom live at the expense of public charity”. The enclosures had successfully created the mass poverty that people like Arthur Young wanted, but that happy state could only be maintained through repression. By the late eighteenth century, a vast list of crimes against property attracted the death sentence. The severity of the code meant convict transportation to New South Wales appeared as a humanitarian alternative. Accordingly, when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour in 1788, it carried with it the direct and indirect victims of enclosure, a generation of men and women forced into crime through dispossession.

Once in the colonies, they became the advance guard of white settlement, posted to the frontier precisely so they, and not their masters, would bear the brunt of Indigenous resistance. The centrality of convicts and former convicts to the Myall Creek atrocity reflected a broader pattern in which, as the focus of land privatisation shifted, the victims of one dispossession became the perpetrators of another.

Ian Angus notes how the rapidity of enclosure in England stemmed from “the imperial wealth that slave traders, plantation owners, and colonial profiteers invested in British estates.” Riches garnered from colonial plunder enabled landowners to privatise whatever open fields remained on their ancestral lands — and then the capital they accumulated through enclosure made possible further imperial expansion. As Angus says, “the brutally expropriated labor of Africans and Indians made possible the expulsion of English and Scottish workers from their lands.” But we should also note that the expropriation of the English, Scottish and Irish commoners contributed to the colonisation of Australia, with the violence unleashed against English commoners facilitating an even more horrific brutality inflicted upon Indigenous people.

Interestingly, John Johnstone, one of the Myall Creek killers, was almost certainly of African heritage. His presence at Dangar’s Station hints at how primitive accumulation unfolded as a global process, with ripples of dislocations spreading through populations in Africa, the Caribbean, North America and elsewhere.

The sequence of global expropriation helps explain the politics of colonialism in the 1830s. By the time of Myall Creek, the enclosure of England had been more-or-less completed. Its conclusion meant the normalisation of wage labour, especially as the memory of the commons faded. The swelling humanitarian sentiment in Britain in the 1830s should be seen in the context of the so-called “double freedom” of a generalised wages system: after being “freed” from the land that once supported her, the worker “freely” sold her ability to labour.

With the buying and selling of labour power established as something like common sense, the coercion by which an earlier generation of capitalists had established the wage system became anomalous, even abhorrent. English liberals recoiled from the ghastly stories they heard from New South Wales, forgetting how the free labour they took for granted in England emerged from a similar terror.

The humanitarians who worried about the theft of Indigenous land also criticised the brutality of convictism — and for the same reason. Both practices represented an affront to the market exchanges that the newly normalised English wages system rested upon. By contrast, the Herald, writing from a colony in which enclosure was very much still in process, frankly asserted that convicts could “only be ruled by terror” and that “as civilisation advances, savage nations must be exterminated sooner or later” (1836). Yet it also recognised some need to forestall sympathy between the victims of European enclosure and the Indigenous people undergoing dispossession in New South Wales.

Today, any alternative to generalised commodity exchange via markets seems to most of us frankly preposterous. We forget that, as Karl Polanyi puts it, “previously to our time, no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets” (Polanyi 1944:45). In 1838, however, various kinds of use value societies still existed all over the world — and the commodification of labour power remained a relatively new phenomenon even in England.

The reliance of the colonial settler state on imported white labour (rather than the proletarianisation of Aboriginal people that “Bushman” advocated) meant that frontier encouters usually culminated in violence — but could they, perhaps, result in solidarity? After Myall Creek, John Fleming, the squatter who planned and led a massacre conducted for his benefit, avoided both trial and punishment, even as the convicts and ex-convicts he commanded died on the gallows (Withycombe 2018). The outcome might, at least in theory, have suggested to some of those transported to the colony that they fought on the wrong side.

The Herald’s campaign sought to forestall any cross-cultural solidarity that might have arisen. Though it drew on the English discourse of enclosure, it presented Indigenous self-provisioning not as a particular manifestation of a system practiced everywhere (and everywhere menaced by capitalism) but the consequence of the supposed biological deficiencies of Aboriginal people. By so doing, it displaced the global class opposition between land privatisers and their victims into a specific unbridgeable antagonism between the settlers of NSW and Indigenous people, a “hegemonic vision of ‘settler’ unity” in opposition to Indigenous society (Wood 2009:67.7).

The imminent replacement of convict transportation with wage labour facilitated the Herald’s efforts, accentuating the perception of Indigenous land, and the unalienated labour it sustained, as anomalous and threatening. By legitimising colonial possession, the argument facilitated an ideological reversal (familiar from other settler states such as South Africa and Israel) in which the colonists could present Indigenous resistance as wilful and unprovoked aggression.

In response to the international outrage about Myall Creek, the Herald denied that “settlers throughout the Colony have ever expressed or entertained the opinion that the aborigines should be ill-treated — far less, that they should be murdered.” Rather, it said, the colonists sought only to live in peace on their land but were prevented from doing so by inexplicable hostility from Indigenous people. The humanitarians were thus quite wrong to see the Myall Creek prosecutions as the equal enforcement of a universal judicial code. On the contrary, explained the Herald, the executions represented egregious discrimination against whites by a government that did not equally punish Aboriginal people for infringing on the legal rights of the squatters. “We say,” the Herald editorialised on 14 November 1838, protect the whites as well as the blacks.

Protect the white settler, his wife, and children, in remote places, from the filthy, brutal cannibals of New Holland. We say to the Colonists, since the Government makes no adequate exertion to protect you, protect yourselves; and if the ferocious savages endeavour to plunder or destroy your property, or to murder yourselves, your families, or your servants, do to them as you would do to any white robbers or murderers — shoot them dead, if you can (1838d).

In 2000, a permanent memorial was established near Myall Creek, with a committee that included descendants of massacre survivors organising an annual commemorative ceremony. Interviewed about the event in 2011, Aunty Sue Blacklock, one of the founders of the monument, explained “it really just makes me feel light. I have found I have no more heaviness in my soul” (Lydon and Ryan 2018:14). On the same occasion, the historian John Maynard described the importance of remembering both the massacre and the frontier wars, and “to stress that our people had fought tenaciously to defend their country right here in Australia in the wake of the British invasion in 1788” (2018:118). The repeated desecration of the monument — as recently as 2021, a racist slogan appeared on the site — underscores that significance (Allam 2021).

As for the Sydney Morning Herald’s statement, perhaps it might help foster the remembrance that Maynard describes. But an apology is truly meaningful when offered as restitution for misdeeds not merely regretted but ended and remedied. The destruction of the global commons secured the universal commodification of labour power and thus the system of capital accumulation that has, in an astonishingly brief period, devastated a country sustained by Indigenous labour over tens of thousands of years. In that sense, the violence of Myall Creek never ended.

Works cited

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