Additional information
| Weight | 510 g |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 230 × 150 × 13 mm |
| ISBN | 9781925877304 |
| Format | |
| Imprint | Boolarong Press |
| Page extent | 294 |
| Publication Year | 2019 |
| Subject | History |
The Battle of One Tree Hill – The Aboriginal Resistance That Stunned Queensland
$34.99
Ray Kerkhove
Frank Uhr
In 1840, Brisbane was the furthest outpost of settled Australia. On all sides, it was embedded in a richly Indigenous world. Over the next few years, mostly from across New South Wales northern plains, a large push of pastoralists poured into the Darling Downs, Lockyer and much of southern Queensland, establishing huge sheep stations. The violence that erupted welded many of the tribal groups into an alliance that, by 1842, was working to halt the advance.
The Battle of One Tree Hill tells the story of one of the most audacious stands against this migration. It concerns actions engineered by a father and son, Moppy and Multuggerah. In 1843, this culminated in an ingenious ambush and one of the first solid defeats of white settlement in Queensland.
The battle at Mount Table Top, 128 kilometres west of Brisbane, astounded many at the time. The response was most likely the largest action of the frontier wars: the assembly of some 100 or more officers, soldiers, police and armed settlers – much of the region’s white settlement – drawn from hundreds of square kilometres. This force sought to drive out the warriors, but despite their best efforts, resistance not only persisted, but managed a few more victories. A fort had to be established to protect travellers, and brutal skirmishes, massacres, raids and robberies trickled on for decades.
The Battle of One Tree Hill introduces us to many of the flamboyant characters, curious reversals of fortune and neglected incidents that together helped establish early Queensland. This narrative work combines decades of archival research, analysis, reconstruction and interviews conducted by historians Ray Kerkhove and Frank Uhr.
admin –
Australian historians have been writing about the frontier wars for a generation. But Kerkhove and Uhr have taken us in a new and important direction. They have provided us with an impeccably researched account of Aboriginal resistance in Southern Queensland which will be a model for similar studies all over Australia. A must read for anyone interested in the evolving understanding of national history.
Professor Henry Reynolds
Author and Historian
Dr. W. Ross Johnston former Head of the Department of History, The University of Queensland former Patron of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) author of numerous works on Queensland History. –
This is a book that deserves to be in all school libraries, and to be used in a syllabus on Australian history and society. It is a very valuable source of information at a time when we are actively seeking to establish a state of Reconciliation, between Indigenous and European cultures, between black and white.
It relates to, and explains, a story that has been forgotten, or maybe even deliberately suppressed and ignored – the cult of ‘silence’. Conditions on the Moreton Bay frontier in the 1840s were very tense; there was considerable violence and aggression on both sides, as the two societies came into ever-increasing contact. A growing wave of European immigrants were seeking ever more land to establish a pastoral economy; the existing Indigenous people obviously wanted to protect their land that they knew so well – and to share its resources as they always had. The two different ways of thinking and living came into inevitable collision – with ‘depredations’ such as the spearing of cattle, and many killings, especially of Aboriginal people in retaliation. Their numbers were no match for horse and musket.
This book is a detailed case study of place, loosely described in today’s terms as the Lockyer Valley/Rosewood area, and its people but it successfully illustrates much broader principles of behaviour and life. Of great value is the way the authors, both well-credentialed in this field of History, have been able to reconstruct, through close and extensive research and analysis, the state of Indigenous life in the early nineteenth century; and they also ‘know the country’ which enables them to provide an informative cultural landscape. We see Indigenous leaders – in particular, Moppy and his son Multuggerah, we come to understand fighting behaviour, from traditional ceremony, through harassment to straight-line attack. There is a change in tactics, from plundering (as an aspect of sharing) to economic warfare and siege. Of great significance is the emergence of an alliance of different groups who usually functioned separately. This brought an important victory at the Battle of One Tree Hill. The European advance was checked – briefly. Thereafter, an increasing European presence, with more power, expressed so ruthlessly in the Native Mounted Police, meant the Indigenous population went into retreat; was increasingly weakened and diminished, until the herding policy of ‘protection’ took over at the end of the nineteenth century.
In Anzac Square, Brisbane, there is a statue to commemorate our great World War 1 hero, Sir Thomas William Glasgow. Where is our memory of another great Australian hero, Multuggerah, who fought to defend his country, his people, his values?
admin –
A quote from Henry Reynolds graces both front and back covers; his endorsement is well deserved. As treaties and truth-telling processes are considered across the many Countries of this land, histories such as this have great importance. They discredit ideas of colonisation as an ordered, lawful process, and reveal the capacity of Aboriginal people to strategise to defend their Country and act within their law.
Reviewer: Dr Amanda Lourie, PHA (Vic & Tas)