I was sent an article; the title of the article was Descended from Both Sides of Queensland's Bloody Massacres. And it was about this historian, she's Butchulla, Quandamooka and Kalkadoon. She was talking about her Ancestors that were both native police officers and victims of massacres from native police officers. So, she's Butchulla, I'm Butchulla and then she mentions her Ancestor, Jack Noble whose real name was Wonamutta. I had been sent recently a family tree and Jack Noble Wonamutta was at the very top of the family tree. So, he's technically, I believe, my great-great-great grandmother's sister – oh sorry, brother – so I was like, oh wow, we share this ancestor.
And It was a history I hadn't heard about before. We're not taught about how the real history of colonisation in schools, especially, it's not sort of known knowledge. We get taught about the Frontier Wars, and that seems like so long ago, but really colonisation was ongoingly violent and deliberate and sadistic, especially with native police officers.
I was shocked myself that I didn't know about this history and I thought it was a history that more people should know about. Because people, you know, don't understand why Aboriginal people are the most, one of the most, incarcerated people on earth. They think that, oh, they're just inherently more likely to commit crimes. What some people don't understand is that it's generations and generations of trauma and control and knowledge being taken from them and family being taken from them. And so, there's this intergenerational trauma that from policing and other colonial labour like native police officers that has extremely real long-term effects. How do we understand, like, present suffering of Indigenous peoples in Australia, if we don't understand how we got to this point.
