Indigenous Australian laws of war: Makarrata, milwerangel and junkarti

Studies in Australian history have lamentably neglected the military traditions of First Australians prior to European contact. This is due largely to a combination of academic and social bigotry, and loss of Indigenous knowledge after settlement. Thankfully, the situation is beginning to change, in no small part due to the growing literature surrounding the Frontier Wars of Australia. All aspects of Indigenous customs and norms are now beginning to receive a balanced analysis. Yet, very little has ever been written on the laws, customs and norms that regulated Indigenous Australian collective armed conflicts. This paper, co-written by a military legal practitioner and an ethno-historian, uses early accounts to reconstruct ten laws of war evidently recognized across much of pre-settlement Australia. The study is a preliminary one, aiming to stimulate further research and debate in this neglected field, which has only recently been explored in international relations.

Assorted Bastards of Australian History

Cook looms as large in Australian statuary as he does in nomenclature and, perhaps especially, psyche. To those who still deify him as the explorer at the vanguard of white-hatted colonial Enlightenment he remains the Neil Armstrong of his day – he who sailed where dragons be to bring English light and civility to the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet. To others of this continent, he is a sinister bogey man and a monster, the doorman who ushered in later colonisation with all its extreme violence, dispossession and ills with his east coast arrival in 1770 – in which his first act was to personally shoot two Gweagal men at Kamai.

Unfinished Business:

Understanding History’s history requires reading and analysing the texts it has produced across time, and the diverse historians who made them. In settler-colonial societies like Australia, understanding the power and process of that curation is especially urgent. This discussion briefly explores aspects of the recent ‘statue wars’ in Australian history and argues that the one constant across these many understandings of Australia over time, is this: History curates the past.