AUSTRALIA: BEFORE SETTLEMENT, A BLOOD-SOAKED LAND

Robert Hill – Quadrant Online,  August 20, 2026

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Australian history has been distorted by lies, fabrication, exaggeration and selective evidence. Out of that distortion has emerged one overwhelming story: that the British arrived in 1788 and turned a peaceful continent into a land of violence, massacre and war.

 

The truth begins in exactly the opposite place.

 

The British did not enter a peaceful continent.

They entered a continent occupied by peoples living in what, in the older anthropological sense, was one of the most materially primitive and socially fragmented forms of human organisation still surviving on earth: thousands of small, mobile, familial groups, without settled agriculture, cities, writing, courts, police or any authority standing above them capable of ending feud and revenge.

 

It is difficult to conceive of a substantially simpler enduring form of human social organisation. Below the small local group lies little more than the immediate or extended family itself.

 

But no human population could remain reproductively isolated at that level for generation after generation: sustained mating within such a narrow circle would inevitably produce repeated close-relative unions and increasing inbreeding. Survival therefore required some network of bestowal, female transfer, and contact between otherwise small and politically separate groups.

 

Revenge killing, payback, punitive expeditions, sorcery killing, ritual punishment, conflict over women and armed fighting between neighbouring groups were already part of the continent’s human landscape.

 

Within the societies in which these practices operated, much of this violence was not regarded as aberrant criminality but as culturally sanctioned conduct, expected, legitimate and, in some circumstances, obligatory.

 

I refer collectively to these recurring forms of socially embedded killing as “cultural lethal violence”. So too, in different places and circumstances, were infanticide, the abandonment or killing of elderly and incapacitated people, and other brutal responses to the material constraints of subsistence life.

 

Practices varied between regions, and no single pattern can be attributed uniformly to every Aboriginal group. But the underlying forms of violence are well attested.

 

There is nothing uniquely Aboriginal about this historical condition. For most of humanity’s existence, human beings everywhere lived in small family-based communities without states, police, courts, modern medicine, stored agricultural surpluses or institutions capable of protecting individuals independently.

 

Every civilisation emerged from materially and institutionally simpler forms of human organisation.

 

The distinction was historical, but profound. At the moment of sustained British contact, Aboriginal societies represented the continuation of a form of human organisation that had existed for tens of thousands of years largely outside the agricultural, urban, literate and state-based civilisations that transformed much of the rest of humanity.

 

The cultural lethal violence embedded in that older order did not largely disappear because thousands of separate communities independently chose to abandon it.

 

It was progressively displaced by the imposition of a new order: British law, police, courts and, ultimately, a state monopoly on legitimate force.

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