Before Settlement, a Blood-Soaked Land Part I
Robert Hill, Quadrant Aug 20 2026
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.
Read Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion