Sex and savagery in the good colony by Julie Marcus

South Australia was supposed to be the ‘good colony’, a utopian dream populated with pious Christian settlers rather than the convicted felons and paupers of other settlements. How did it become a ‘deathscape’ of violence, murder, and sexual predation during the holocaust years of the late 1800s? This is the question at the heart of Julie Marcus’s carefully researched book.

It was intended that the colony’s Indigenous people were to have the full rights of British subjects under the law, however the taking of their land was legitimised by regarding the land as waste, untended, and the people morally inferior, even cannibals, to be saved by missionaries, or the whole problem just removed in some way. Recorded actions such as ‘collision’ or ‘dispersal’ or ‘a brush with the natives’, ‘an affray’ or ‘teaching them a lesson’, were euphemistic terms to cover up the murders and massacres.

The book is set out in short chapters, the titles clearly identifying each subject; thus you can read about explorer Edward John Eyre and his ‘relationship’ with Aboriginal children, the Rufus River massacre, the Eyre Peninsula war, ‘much difficulty with the Aborigines’ in the Flinders, warfare in the dry lands of the far north, Gason’s massacres along the Overland Telegraph Line, Mounted Constable Willshire and his rampages . . . and so it goes on.

As Marcus points out it is the Aboriginal women who suffered the worst savagery, the sexual violence, rape and murder. Aboriginal women’s suffering and their heroism is a theme that is also explored in another Wakefield Press publication, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin. Both books expose a hidden history and both are edifying reading. I urge you to add these essential readings to your library’s Australian history collection.

Themes: Australian history, Colonialism, Frontier, Violence, Morals, Dispossession, War, Aboriginal peoples.

Helen Eddy