Family ghosts
Two luminaries of Australian writing grapple with the bloodthirsty brutality of their own families.
Unsettled Killing for Country
By Kate Grenville By David Marr
Black Inc, 2025 Black Inc, 2024
How do we face up to the genocide that followed the British invasion in 1788? It’s a question Australians have never been comfortable asking. Kate Grenville’s Unsettled and David Marr’s Killing for Country are good places to start. They embrace the discomfort we’ve steadfastly avoided.
Grenville approaches her family tale as a contemplation. Her pilgrimage retraces the steps taken by generations of innkeepers and drovers in their hunger for grazing lands. Her focus on place and on family creates the space for deep reflection as her journey unfolds.
In Killing for Country Marr digs up page after page of buried truths. Assisted by his partner, Sebastian Tesoriero, he gathers reams of evidence of the mass slaughter of First Nations people up and down the east coast. The violence is gut-wrenching enough; the sheer number of atrocities is sickening.
Members of Marr’s family led the charge. As officers in the Native Police, Reginald Uhr, Marr’s great, great grandfather, and his brother D’arcy, were “in the massacre business”. The blood of the rich and powerful ran thick in the family veins. Their uncle, Richard Jones, was a banker, merchant, squatter and long-serving member of the NSW Legislative Council.
His ancestors’ hunger for pasture – driven by the high price of wool – is harrowing. Not least because the justifications for the massacres are breathtaking. “To the raw squatter mind,” writes Marr, “the land belonged to no one. It was waiting to be taken. Settlers saw themselves as defending their land against a band of vengeful savages.”
Offer of dancing met with a firing squad
Marr’s legal training serves him well as he prosecutes his case. Having guns was never enough. Using them indiscriminately was the order of the day. In the Darling Downs a party of Native Police was approached by a group of Mandandangi people who offered to dance with them. Commanding officer Lieutenant John Marlow “ordered them shot”.
In the 1850s a large group of Gayiri men and women surrounded a newly built homestead on their lands on the Nogoa River west of Rockhampton. After witnessing the squatters commandeer their best lands and waterholes for their stock, they went on the attack. Nineteen whites were killed.
The reprisals were widespread. It’s estimated 400 First Peoples were massacred by vigilante groups in the weeks that followed. “The Yiman, Wadjigu, Gayiri and Darumbal peoples were nearly wiped out,” writes Marr. “Land clearing” didn’t stop at trees.
Guns were not the only weapons. The law in the bush was what the squatters made it. Pastoralists and military officers were appointed as magistrates and jurors. Indigenous people were barred from giving evidence in court until 1876. When colonial parliaments were formed, the franchise was limited to those who owned (stolen) property.
Dithering pronouncements from London on the rights of First Nations were easily ignored. With no attempt to provide any semblance of justice, and an imperial lust for riches, “dispersal” of Indigenous peoples became synonymous with murder.
Grenville’s bush pilgrimage
Marr’s exposé of the squattocracy lands with the hefty thud of a judicial inquiry. Grenville’s family history is told with an inquisitive humility. We are in the hands of an artist whose brush strokes settle in our consciousness even as the picture is being formed. The effect, at first intriguing, becomes more unsettling as her canvas fills out.
To make sense of her family story Grenville embarks on a road trip from Wisemans Ferry to Tamworth and beyond. From her great great great grandfather Solomon Wiseman onwards, she retraces the family movements a generation at a time. Their mission? Armed robbery: “opening up the land the way a burglar opens up a house”.
Anchoring her journey are the family stories passed down from mother to daughter over six generations. The Secret River author is more interested in what these stories leave out than their reverent pioneering spirit. “Looking back at the novels I’ve written about the past, I can see that they’re really about what I’m doing now: using the family stories as a way of trying to get beyond them to a bigger truth.”
Scrambling up hillsides and through fences, driving along bumpy backroads and wandering through inns built by distant relatives, Grenville surrounds herself in their world. “Big though the pub is, thick though the walls are, it’s nothing more than a speck of something foreign in the immense old landscape pressing in on all sides.”
As she moves through the Hunter Valley and Liverpool Plains, her scepticism about heroic family tales grows. As does her admiration for those who'd lived there for thousands of years. “Once it’s sunk in how intensely the place [traditional land] was groomed and manipulated, how densely used, how carefully divided up into territories … it’s impossible to hang onto that comfortable idea of nomads going walkabout.”
Grenville’s search for truth is both a meditation on the past and a cry from the heart. History as written by the victors, family lore told evasively, have long weighed her down. Her pilgrimage is a way of letting go of this burden. “The taking of the land is the heart of our history. Thinking I didn’t need to know exactly how it happened was just another way of not facing that history.”
Academic trailblazers
Some distinguished writers, academics and agitators have gone down this path long before Grenville and Marr. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner coined the term “the Great Australian Silence” in his 1968 Boyer Lectures. Frontier historian Henry Reynolds called his study of those who opposed the slaughter and dispossession This Whispering in our Hearts (1998, revisited version 2020).
Stanner and Reynolds threw light on the dark secrets of colonialism. Marr and Grenville carry the torch much closer to home. They grapple with their family ghosts with a deep yearning for honesty and accountability.
Read together, their books are companion volumes from the contrasting perspectives of journalist and novelist. Marr, led by his inquisitive mind, is relentless in presenting his case. Grenville opens her heart on her journey of discovery and sits with her anguish and remorse.
The answers will come
Their family histories provide fresh perspectives on the killing times of the 19th century. Writers of their skill and determination take us to a place of reckoning from which we can no longer hide. The stories they re-tell strip away denial and banish delusion. We are left to ask, What now?
As we move tentatively towards truth, justice and treaty, the answers will come. Perhaps then, when we lay down our weapons once and for all, we can finally dance together.