Defiant construction workers fined for defending union flag

 Written by: Danny O. on 31 January 2021

Sixty-four Brisbane construction workers have been hit with personal fines of $1,750 each by the Federal Circuit Court after they took strike action in defence of flying CFMEU union flags on site. 

The federal government’s anti-union attack dog, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) took the 64 workers to court for “illegal” industrial action following a one-day walkout on 11 September 2018. The workers on a luxury apartment project in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, reportedly walked off the job in protest against the removal of union flags by Japanese-owned builder Icon.

In his decision to fine the workers, Judge Michael Jarrett noted about the strike that “Whilst it is objectively serious, it falls at the lower end of the scale,” and that financial loss was minimal. The $1,750 fines are a fraction of the maximum $42,000 penalty that the workers could have been hit with.

However, the construction workers remained defiant, with the judge remarking, “There has not … been any express statement of remorse or contrition by any of the respondents. The respondents have not apologised for their unlawful conduct.”  And nor should they!

The timing of the fines comes as the construction industry awaits the decision of the ongoing case between building giant Lendlease and the ABCC over clauses in the Building Code in relation to the legality of displaying union insignia, posters and flags on building sites. (*) If the courts were to rule in the ABCC’s favour in that case, the walkout displayed by this group of workers is the kind of action that would need to be replicated en masse on building sites across the country to defend the union’s presence on site.          

The case of the 64 workers is also noteworthy for the unusual fact that the ABCC only pursued the individual striking workers and did not attempt to prosecute the union or its officials, despite two officials being on site when the walkout took place. It’s not the first time the courts have issued individual construction workers with fines, but it may be the first time that only the workers have been fined. However, the ABCC is also pursuing 53 steel fixers who attended the ACTU’s ‘Change the Rules’ rally in April 2019, though the court is yet to make any decision in that case.

The 64 fined workers should be congratulated for their actions and willingness to stand defiant in defence of their rights and their union. It will take many more like them to see the back of the ABCC and tear up this country’s anti-worker laws. 
-------------
(*) Further reading: ABCC and Lendlease in court battle of Eureka flag ban 

Biden and the subservience of Australia

 Written by: (Contributed) on 28 January 2021

Two recent high-level statements released from Canberra have revealed a great deal about problems confronting Australia in the post-Trump world of US diplomacy.

The first, a statement about the incoming Biden administration in the US was both lengthy and deliberately misleading about key issues, which were not addressed. No information, for example, was given about present growing economic problems, and reference to the US-led military and security frameworks which form the basis of the so-called 'alliance' between Australia and the US were quickly glossed over.

The second, provided an assessment of the Pacific, an area of Australian direct regional involvement. It drew attention to problems confronting Australia without providing clarification of the economic models which remain the cause of many of the problems arising.

Both statements can be regarded as raising serious questions about present state of Australia-US diplomacy, the present Cold War and trade war with China.

To coincide with Australia Day celebrations, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, released a major diplomatic statement about support for the incoming Biden administration in the US. It was carefully worded and designed to reassure the US that Australia would continue to support the so-called 'alliance', which has dominated foreign policy considerations for Canberra since the end of the Second World War. (1)

While the statement raised various questions and problems facing the US diplomacy it was light-weight on appropriate answers. Reference to how the US was now faced with 'a more complex and challenging world', was only addressed with continued support from Australia 'in the Pacific and South-east Asia', which, historically, has been the area allocated by the US for Australian involvement on behalf of 'US interests'. (2) Reference was provided, however, about the significance of the 'Quad', the US-led defence and security body composed of Australia and Japan as regional hubs, with the recent addition of India, without divulging too much incriminating information.

Three days earlier a media release issued by Prime Minister Scott Morrison claiming Australia's 'alliance' with the US was considered more vital than ever, was likewise, brief on meaningful content although punctuated with numerous obsequious and sycophantic references toward the Biden administration. (3)

The fact the main diplomatic statement contained no reference to deteriorating economic considerations, both regionally and globally, is therefore, an interesting omission, designed specifically to divert attention away from a serious problem.

Information from the World Bank has revealed global GDP contracted 4.3 per cent last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic when measured for Real GDP, with the percentage change from previous year being recorded:

                 
                WORLD ECONOMY                    2018          2019          2020
                                                      
                                                                       3.0             2.3            -4.3

                ADVANCED ECONOMIES:           2.2             1.8            -5.4

                EMERGING MARKETS /               4.3             2.3            - 4.3     
                DEVELOPING COUNTRIES                                                        (4)

While the economic situation in emerging markets and the developing countries has proved dire, the position in the advanced economies has proved far worse with lasting implications.
                                                                                              
The global economy is expected to grow by only a maximum of 4.0 per cent this year; the global economy will be about 5.3 per cent or $4.7 trillion smaller in 2021 than previously planned with lower levels of investment considered a major factor. (5) The World Bank noted, in an official publication at the start of 2021, that 'prospects for the global economy are uncertain'. (6)

The present deep economic malaise, however, has rested upon longer-term problems, from previous decades when measured with annual recorded levels of GDP growth:

                 
                 GLOBAL ECONOMY:          MID-1960s          about 7.0 per cent
                                                                 2019 / 2020         just over 2.0 per cent
                  
                 AUSTRALIA:                        MID-1960s          7.0 per cent
                                                                2019 / 2020          just over 2.0 per cent  (7)             

It has been noted 'years of disappointing growth also followed the 2008 global financial crisis … global forecasts … falling to an average 2.4 per cent annually … from 3.3 per cent seen before the crisis'. (8) In the decade from 2018-28 they are now likely to fall even further.

With such dismal economic statistics revealing the deteriorating nature of much of the global economy, it was, perhaps, only natural that reference to the problem was not included in the recent Australian diplomatic statement from Canberra.

The second diplomatic statement from Canberra, was not a departure from the first. It dealt with problems arising in the Pacific; it acknowledged there was a need to establish 'greater Australian business and investment in an environment in which there's almost no Australian banking and finance presence' to facilitate economic development. (9)

Problems, however, have arisen.

Informed opinion, elsewhere, about the present US-led Cold War toward China has already drawn attention to the problem of Australian business interests pitted against 'so-called security hawks', which invariably take a pro-US position of diplomacy and view all developments through Cold War focus, particularly in the Pacific. (10)

Most of the small Pacific island countries have been hit particularly badly with the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Their economies have tended to be based on small-scale production of cash-crops or mineral extraction with foreign mining companies. The usual economic structures across the region are, invariably, neo-colonial and designed specifically to serve the interests of foreign investors.

The economic models were foisted upon the countries as they achieved political and diplomatic independence; their newly independent governments were never allowed to ask major questions about economic sovereignty or the nature of the massive flows of finance capital which entered their economies and silently departed with huge dividends for shareholders elsewhere.

In recent times, however, China has emerged as a major diplomatic player in the region. It has specialised in 'softer-style' diplomacy with massive infra-structure programs to facilitate economic development. China's ascendancy has proved both rapid and dynamic; in fact, it has already successfully dislodged traditional US hegemonic positions. Claims from a retired US military leader that the US 'had lost reassured command of the Western Pacific', have coincided with an official US Congressional report 'the US is no longer clearly superior', have revealed the implications of changing balance of forces for US diplomatic positions. (11)

The changing balance of forces has already started to dislodge traditional neo-colonial relations across the Pacific as countries develop more favourable diplomatic links with China.

It is, therefore, interesting to note the future implications for Australia in its nearby region, where the US economy might achieve 3.5 per cent economic growth rates this year after shrinking 3.6 per cent last year, while China's economy is expected to expand by nearly 8.0 per cent this year. (12) The imbalance has already been noted along the lines that 'the upshot is a world more reliant on China for growth than ever before', which would appear particularly the case in the Pacific. (13)

It does not take long to realise under such economic considerations, diplomatic tensions are likely to continue in Australia's immediate neighbourhood, even with the demise of the Trump administration and their trade war with China. At the end of the Trump administration it was noted in Australia's Defence Strategic Update, 2020, for example, that the Cold War polarisation between the US and China had the result that  'Australia's security environment … was ... increasingly characterised by grey-zone competition; state behaviour that is aggressive but often covert, or at least deniable, and falls short of acts of war.' (14)

No wonder the two recent high-level diplomatic statements from Canberra were so carefully worded when dealing with the US, the incoming Biden administration and problems in the Pacific which have a direct bearing upon Australia, they had a great deal to hide:

                                            We need an independent foreign policy!

1.     As Biden says, this great alliance will only grow stronger, Australian, 25 January 2021.

2.     Ibid.
3.     Our alliance is more vital than ever: PM., Australian, 22 January 2021.
4.     Global Economic Prospects, The World Bank, January 2021, page 4.
5.     World Bank warns, Markets Insider, 6 January 2021.
6.     Global Economic Prospects, op.cit., page 5.
7.     GDP Growth rates, country by country, annual percentage, World Bank.
8.     World Bank warns of a 'lost decade' ahead, Australian, 7 January 2021.
9.     Aussie businesses need to help check China in the Pacific, Australian, 25 January 2021.     
10.   We can't combat China's 'grey zone' war while polarised, Australian, 20 January 2021.   
11.   US losing control of Pacific to Beijing, The Weekend Australian, 5-6 December 2020; and, Study: US no longer dominant power in the Pacific, Paul D. Shinkman, Information Clearing House, 22 August 2019.
12.   Markets insider, op.cit., 6 January 2021; and, China only big economy to grow in 2020,  Australian, 19 January 2021.  
13.   China powers ahead while the world reels, Australian, 15 January 2021.
14.   We can't combat China's 'grey zone' war while polarised, op.cit., 20 January 2021.

What’s this American democracy crap?

 Written by: Humphrey McQueen on 28 January 2021

When was the U.S. of A. ever more than a covert dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?

For the past 130 years it has been a Plutocracy. Obama, ‘the whispering assassin,’ appointed one of his Wolf Street backers to be Treasury Secretary. They poured trillions into Wolf Street and refused to save mortgagees from homelessness.

During 2020, the richest 1,000 billionaires increased their wealth by a third.

 

Biden is the ‘proud, proud, proud son‘ of and Senator for the State of Dow-du Pont, those Merchants of Death, – aka Delaware - an on-shore tax haven for the likes of Mass Murdoch.

From the genocidal dispossession of the Amerindians and arrival of chattel-slaves across the 1600s, the North American colonies were rarely better than games among the ruling race - Herrenvolk democracies, as under Apartheid.

The radical Reconstructionists thought that their Thirteenth, then the Fourteenth Amendment and finally the Fifteenth by 1870 had guaranteed the suffrage for the freed male slaves. The Klan judged otherwise.

At once, railroad corporations went before the racist Supreme Court demanding equal rights for property. To get its way, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil did everything to the Legislature of Pennsylvania – except refine it.

By 1890, the corporations had won. Also by then, almost no Black dared to vote.

To the extent that there has been anything like a democratic impulse in the U.S. of A. it has come through social movements that the apologists for the monopolizers denounce as anti-democratic.

The Civil Rights movement pushed back from 1954 and the struggles were taken further by Black Power in the late Sixties. Their leaders were assassinated or framed.

The other force against class dictatorship, covert or overt, was the organised working-class from the mid-1800s. At several points in time and various places, the unions allied with progressive farmers to challenge the Trusts and their legislative lackeys.

Bosses paid Pinkertons and the National Guard to destroy organised labour, notoriously in the shooting of Joe Hill

The women’s movement has woven in and out and around Civil Rights and labour – the Lady Garment Workers Union. The first place in the world where women could vote was New Jersey from 1776 to 1807 and then Wyoming from 1870.

Those three streams of popular expression are our brightest and best hopes for getting out from under the iron heel of a covert bourgeois dictatorship.

The alarms over Trumpery voiced by the New York Times (which has never seen a war it did not like) are that he and his crew have weakened the image of America as the shining City on the Hill.

That soft power is necessary if the agents of the corporate warfare state are to pose as the bringers of peace, freedom and apple pie. Woodrow Wilson had shown the way by making the world safe for hypocrisy.

Much of the world had to be taught a different lesson. For instance, FDR’s middle name was Delano – and that branch of the family did a roaring trade pushing opium into China. A few years later, Commodore Perry bombarded the U.S. into Japan. In the 1890s, its agents had murdered the Queen of Hawaii and gabbed the islands as its own.

Closer to home, the Monroe Doctrine switched from being a rule to keep European colonizers out of Latin America into a law that the continent was a U.S. colony in all but name.

Between 1898 and 1910, the banana and sugar corporations snatched national independence from the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and away from the Philippines.

Since then, its Marines and spies have swept around the globe making democracy safe for Big Oil. They overthrow popularly elected governments and assassinate their leaders. They would have murdered Castro and killed Chavez earlier than they did had not the Cuban and Venezuelan peoples formed rings of steel around them.

The C.I.A. got their sleeper John Kerr to sack Whitlam to protect their base at Pine Gap.

Trump has done a better job at serving the people of the world by weakening the U.S. imperium than one would have expected out of a burst arsehole.

Of course, his achievements on that front are as nothing when compared with how the peoples of Indo-China had driven the U.S. imperialists into the sea by 1975.

Billary did her bit by blowing another whole in the power grid with her overthrow of the vile Gadhafi, to go with Bush-era self-inflicted wounds in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump has not divided America but ridden the wave of socioeconomic divisions sown by a succession of Democratic administrations ever since 1979 when Carter appointed Volker to the Federal Reserve to shut down the rust-bucket industries by driving up the Greenback.

Do not despair. Biden will continue the good work of dividing America by serving the interests of his patrons in Wolf St.

He has a minor problem after scoring a paper-thin majority in the Senate which cost him the excuse of not being able to get his bills passed. Now he will have to rely on that succession of Democrat Senators who abstain or cross the floor to repay which corporates stuffed their electoral coffers, as Big Pharma did for Billary.

January 6 was a sideshow compared to the assaults on electoral ‘democracy’ from the Supreme Court at promoting corporate power and State Legislatures in depriving the poor of their ability to vote at all, and - just to be on the safe side - to gerrymander the boundaries of electoral districts.

Among the results is that the world’s greatest democracy boasts the worst records for disease, mis-education and injustice in the self-styled developed world.

Get over Congressional Cretinism!

Doing good is not in the job description for the Commander-in-Chief.

Face up to the uncomfortable truth that we face a hundred-year long fight to rid the planet of all the imperia of monopolizing capitals whether the hangovers in Britain and France, the staggering U.S. of A. or its Chinese rival, by establishing people power here, there and everywhere.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Thomas Jefferson, 1787.

Sydney Invasion Day rally is a defiant victory in face of state suppression

 

Written by: Lindy Nolan on 27 January 2021

The Invasion Day rally in Djarrbarrgalli, Sydney’s Doman, was an important victory.

Two months of pressure, blackmail and threats aimed to isolate organisers and frighten away participants. Yet, between five and ten thousand people were prepared to physically defy government and police orders.

They had been invited by Elders, Custodians, to stand on sacred ground, and attend they would.

It is an honour to have been among those First Peoples and their allies in Djarrbarrgalli.

The night before, live on NITV, Gumbaynggirr-Danggali-Naaguja-Yamatji singer Emma Donovan saluted the marchers around the continent, but clearly and particularly, it seemed, to she spoke to give courage to those so close to where she grew up, in Surry Hills near Redfern. 

Then she sang to life the years of marches past and yet to come in Language. 

There was no march in Sydney on January 26, through last minute compromise between organisers and police. But the voices of First Peoples were heard loud and clear: Sovereignty never ceded. Self-determination. Stop the violence, thefts and murders. Pay reparations.

Police spokespeople can bleat all they like that police are ‘committed to working in partnership with the community to deal with issues like the ones raised by Indigenous protesters’. They are the organised front-line defenders of invasion and imperialism.

But there will be no peace until there is justice.

Australia is a crime scene. The rallies and marches are symbols of unstoppable change that is coming beneath the very noses of the invaders. 

The SA Draft Pastoral Lands Bill 2020 Is Corrupt

 

Written by: Fred Kelly on 27 January 2021

Due to the nature of capitalism, in the contradiction between sustainable practices and the profit motive, the profit motive will always be the principal aspect, while sustainable practices play a subordinate role. 

This is shown, for example, by the slow reaction of the world’s countries to come face to face with the climate crisis, while we, the general population, the workers, the future generations, are knocking on the door of a world-wide catastrophe. Policies and international pacts have been made, but truly, the international capitalists are trying to scrape out of this doing the bare minimum! 

This is evident in Scott Morrison’s refusal to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and his proposed plan of a ‘gas-led recovery’ out of the Covid-19 recession. Capitulation to sustainable practices will generally be made in the name of profit; these capitulations may serve to dull a popular mass cause, or, to solidify future profits because if sustainable practices aren't put in place there will be nothing to extract profit from in the future. To put it simply, the quick buck or the long play. Land conservation policies will generally have one or both of these aspects in mind.

When land is cleared for grazing and that land is overgrazed and/or a drought kills off the ground cover flora, the topsoil becomes loose and contributes to the available soil a dust storm can draw from. Australia already has a history of overgrazing and land clearing, and coupled with regular drought, Australia has seen many a severe dust storm. Now we face climate change which threatens an increase in frequency and intensity of drought, creating conditions for the increased frequency and intensity of dust storms. On January 11th, 2020, Australia was hit by one of these dust storms, visible from space by NASA satellites (see image above). Additionally, there are areas in Australia that are experiencing drought with the lowest rainfall on record. With current land practices, the future is grim.

In South Australia a new bill has been proposed, the Draft Pastoral Lands Bill 2020, which is to replace the Pastoral Land Management and Conservation Act of 1989. As the removal of conservation from the title may suggest, these changes are not in the interest of sustainable practices. This new bill has the quick buck in mind. It is likely to increase allocated watering points and maximum stocking limits of livestock on pastoral leases. This promotes overgrazing and draining of our natural water bodies.

The SA Pastoral Board members administrate 40% of all land in SA, with 1-2% of that land designated as conservation land. The Pastoral Board, whose six members appointed by the Minister of the South Australian Department of Primary Industry, in accordance with the Pastoral Land Management and Conservation Act of 1989 requires the board consist of: (1) someone with experience in administration of pastoral leases; (2) an ecologist; (3) a soil scientist; (4) a beef cattle pastoralist; (5) a sheep pastoralist; and (6) a conservationist. It is currently unknown if the board is legally comprised in accordance with the bill; further, six out of six board members are from agricultural backgrounds who hold pastoral leases. The Chairman of the board is David Larkin, the CEO of Hancock Agriculture and Australian Outback Beef, both companies owned by Gina Rinehart. You can infer where the interests of the Pastoral Board lie. 

It gets worse from here. The Draft bill keeps the facade of requiring a diversification of backgrounds on the Pastoral Board while gutting it of any real substances. It is proposed that the Minister will appoint up to seven board members who must have knowledge or experience in one of the following: (1) operational management of pastoral leases; (2) natural resource management and conservation of productive pastoral land; (3) governance; (4) financial management; and (5) native title and the cultural and traditional connections of Aboriginal people to the land. There is no requirement that the board be comprised of members from each category. Hypothetically, 100% of the board could be comprised of people with experience in finance management and nothing else. 

Australian Outback Beef has stated objectives of increasing the number of watering points on their pastoral leases, which would effectively increase the number of cattle on their properties. Both the allotting of new watering points and increase in cattle stocking limits must be approved by the Pastoral Board, again, whose chairman is the CEO of Australian Outback Beef. And with the changes made in the Draft Bill, there might not be any push back (if there is any currently). 

The Draft Pastoral Land Management Bill 2020 must not be put into law. It will only serve to profit those whose interests lie with the degradation of our environment. 

Serco: Privatised Prisons Have A Long History

 Written by: Ned K. on 27 January 2021

Privatisation of prisons is still very much on the agenda of capitalism's governments in Australia. British based multinational Serco recently took over the Remand Centre in Adelaide to add to its private prison profit making in Australia.

This month Serco was fined $100,000 after a prisoner used a clothes rope to escape from the centre.

Soon after the escape, Public Sector Association (PSA) general secretary Nev Kitchin argued that "privately run prisons simply don't work".

"We're looking at multinational companies, we're looking at fewer staff, we're looking at inferior training, we're looking at more assaults occurring in the private prisons, we're looking at more contraband getting into the private prisons, and we're looking at overall reduced safety," he said.

Privatisation of prisons has a long history going back at least to the pre- prison reform movement in the late 1700s in England, about the same time as overflowing prisons there gave rise to transportation of prisoners to the colony of NSW.

In his extraordinarily researched book, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes had this to say about the prison system in England in the 1750s to 1800 period. Prisons at that time were "holes in which prisoners could be forgotten. Their purpose was not reform, but terror and sublimation". For First Nations People in Australia today, nothing much has changed.

Hughes goes on to say that,

"About half the jails of England were privately owned and run. Chesterfield jail belonged to the Duke of Portland, who sublet it to a keeper for 18 guineas a year. The Bishop of Ely owned a prison, the Bishop of Durham had the Durham County jail, and Halifax jail belonged to the Duke of Leeds. Their jailers were not state employees but small businessmen who made their profits by extorting money from prisoners. On entering the Bishop of Ely's lock-up, a prisoner was chained down to the floor with a spiked collar riveted round his neck until he disgorged a fee for "easement of irons" 

Prisoners "paid for food , for drink, for bedding, water and even air"!

Prisoners had to pay rent as well. Nowadays prisoners often work to make profit for private jail owners. 

Nothing much has changed

Morrison’s ancestors’ land theft

 Written by: John G. on 26 January 2021

“It’s all about acknowledging how far we’ve come. You know, when those 12 ships turned up in Sydney, all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either”. [Scott Morrison referring to Australia Day, Gladstone Qld, The New Daily, 21 Jan 2021]

It ”wasn’t a great day for my fifth great-grandfather, William Roberts” Morrison revealed  to The Guardian while also revealing in the Second Fleet, on the Neptune, was Kezia Brown, a gardeners' labourer convicted of stealing clothing who would become Mr Morrison's fifth-great-grandmother.

(Scott Morrison, National flag-raising and citizenship ceremony, Canberra, per The Guardian 26 January 2019)

But nothing is mentioned of Morrison’s ancestors' later lives and their interactions with traditional inhabitants of the land where they settled.

 

He revels in fragmentary facts and in doing so hides or hides from the whole truth. 

 

He also strives to shut down ideas at odds with his celebratory vibe, in his own turn to cancel culture.   

 

Morrison’s ancestors were early settlers on the Hawkesbury frontier 

 

Records show Morrison’s ancestors, William Roberts and Keiza Brown, settled a government land grant in the Hawkesbury district on the Dyarubbin River near Pitt Town in 1796. The family bought and operated the nearby ‘Hobby Farm’ near the original grant until the 1950s.

 

The granted land was alienated from its traditional inhabitants by Morrison’s forebears setting up camp, clearing land, removing traditional yam crops and replacing them with maize, wheat, potatoes and like European crops, grazing pigs and cattle on it. Their settlement involved exclusion of traditional inhabitants from return to or systematic ongoing use of the land. That exclusion denied traditional inhabitants access to foods sources, leaving them to harvest what crops were on their ground and take stock for food and to fatten for themselves when the opportunity arose.  

 

The traditional inhabitants proved insistent on returning to their land for sowing, tending and harvesting crops, harvesting bush tucker, catching game or other animals and just enjoying their nurra and culture on it. 

 

Hawkesbury settlers were just as insistent on enjoying sole occupancy, to use the legal term.

 

Both sides escalated the means they used from demands and threats, to armed confrontations, ambushes and raids, plundering or destroying crops and infrastructure, assaults, killings, and eventually resorting to the first persistent settler – First Peoples war on the continent in three waves between 1795 and 1816. 

 

Morrison’s forebears were part of the first community to engage in three waves of persistent settler-First Peoples warfare over a 19-year period in Australia involving numerous officially-recorded exceptionally brutal clashes. 

 

Was It War? You bet it was.

 

Recognising qualms many have in using the term war, let’s get the term straight. 

 

The Australian Defence Force defines war as “a clash of wills involving organised violence as an extension of politics. In war, the fundamental goal is to make the adversary comply with your will”, and notes war “as a means of achieving political objectives”, “resolve a difference between nation states or non-state groups”. . 

 

In the Hawkesbury between 1795 and 1816, settler society and the British Military used organised violence against traditional inhabitants to secure their personal security and hold over disputed territory and crops etc. That much is quite clear from the records and its commonly understood. Traditional inhabitants used organised violence to recover their land from the strangers who had taken it over is also clear from the records but less commonly understood. 

 

It’s hard to dispute organisation for violence when, in one instance, an estimated 500 warriors massed with arms in hand to confront settlers.  

 

There was a clash of wills and organised violence to make the adversary comply with their will on both sides. 

 

It sure was war. And it was the first persistent war between the adversaries on the continent. Morrison’s family were part of the community involved from just after it began. This was their pioneering.  

 

The Hawkesbury settler community was heavily outnumbered, just a bit over 400 white settlers in 1796, when Morrison’s ancestors settled, including women and children. At the same time bodies of up to 500 traditional men alone were occasionally encountered in ceremony and armed clashes. To overcome traditional inhabitants’ persistent moves to displace the settlers, the settler community relied on a permanent military station of troops in barracks at Windsor for over 50 years from 1797 until 1843. 

 

The Hawkesbury frontier wars were the first that persisted and quite brutal

 

From time to time this military presence could not contain the traditional inhabitants’ struggles to retake their lands and drive the strangers away. Counter-insurgency military sweeps by troops from the Sydney and Parramatta forces were sent to drive the traditional inhabitants from the Hawkesbury and other frontier districts and their surrounds. 

 

After all, the Hawkesbury settlement was vital to the very survival of the Sydney outpost in the drought of the early 1790s. The colony’s food stocks had fallen to the extent that rations could not sustain life and convicts died in their hundreds. Of 122 convicts from one ship only 50 survived the rigours of 1792. 

 

The British colonial prison outpost was in danger of collapse.  Supply ships were infrequent and unreliable. Only when the Hawkesbury settlement was established and provided a bumper crop was the survival of the colony secured.  

 

Morrison’s ancestors weren’t going anywhere, and had the troops and imperial determination to back them up through murder and terror wrought on the traditional inhabitants. Records of the day in official documents and written accounts provide rich testimony of it. 

 

Take every native Prisoner, Fire on Runaways, String bodies in trees, Strike Terror in Survivors – Governor’s Orders

 

Just a couple of examples bookending the Hawkesbury frontier wars illustrate the nature of the military sweeps. 

 

After allegations of 2 settlers being killed by Darug people in May 1795, the acting governor Capt. W. Paterson, a veteran of 4 years of the Anglo-Mysore wars in India, despatched 2 NSW Regiment officers and 66 soldiers to the Hawkesbury with orders to, ‘drive the natives to a distance;’ and, ‘in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung.’ (Fletcher B., ‘Grose, Paterson and the Settlement of the Hawkesbury, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 51, no, 4 , 1965 p 341 – 9 as per Kerskens G. People of the River, A&U, 2020.)

 

When the detachment found a Darug camp at night a contemporaneous report noted; “The roar of muskets filled the night air, followed by the screams of the wounded and dying. The soldiers saw seven or eight of the Bediagal fall down in the undergrowth, but when they went out next morning to find the bodies and string them up they found that the Bediagal (a Darug clan) had carried away their comrades’ bodies during the night.’ 

 

After the ‘success’ of the “Battle of Richmond Hill”, Capt. Paterson was promoted to major later that year. (Australian Dictionary of Biology, ANU, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/paterson-william-2541  )

 

It was no unique incident. 

 

On 9 April 1816 Governor Lachlan Macquarie issued similar rules of engagement for three detachments of British colonial troops to fire upon and strike terror into ‘natives’. The troops were to sweep through the Hawkesbury and Appin districts to secure the settlers and food production from persistent armed raids of settled lands by the traditional inhabitants, then being systematically excluded from the lands.

 

“On any occasion of seeing or falling in with the Natives, either in bodies or singly, they are to be called on, by your friendly Native Guides, to surrender themselves to you as Prisoners of War. If they refuse to do so, make the least show of resistance, or attempt to run away from you, you will fire upon and compel them to surrender, breaking and destroying the spears, clubs, and waddies of all those you take Prisoners. Such Natives as happen to be killed on such occasions, if grown up men, are to be hanged up on trees in conspicuous situations, to strike the Survivors with the greater terror.” (Editor’s emphasis)

 

The outcome was the massacre of 14 Aboriginal people, others driven off a cliff, heads cut off two victims and their bodies strung from trees, women and children taken prisoner. Macquarie hosted a celebratory dinner for the officers responsible. (Macquarie Papers – Single Letters and Fragments 1801-1820.)

 

 

This author’s forebears shared Morrison’s ancestors’ experiences

 

What are Morrison and his cronies trying to shut down?

 

Traditional lands were seized. Traditional inhabitants were excluded from their seized lands and food sources. Efforts to retake land and drive out the thieves were resisted with escalating force.

 

The British Military regularly swept through the settler districts to drive out traditional inhabitants, consolidate the land grab and provide personal security to the settler communities. The military and some settlers used brutal violence and terror to drive away traditional inhabitants. 

 

But it’s not just Morrison. 

 

This author’s forbears shared the same Hawkesbury district, granted land just a couple of years before Morrison’s forebears and a few kilometres away. My forebears shared in the land theft, denial of food sources, reliance on brutal force to impose their will on the traditional inhabitants.

 

And there are many thousand more of us whose ancestors participated in the same activity across the country. We do need to acknowledge not just how far we’ve come but to do that we need to know what happened on the way. Morrison doesn’t know or doesn’t want to acknowledge it. 

 

We are sympathetic to Koreans and Chinese who call for Japan to acknowledge the atrocities Koreans and Chinese suffered at the hands of Japanese armies in WWII. We hold dear the national memory of the suffering and sacrifice on the Changi railway in the same conflict. We cherish and acknowledge the apologies of Japanese who partook of that brutality and embrace their successors. 

 

We don’t put up with talk of these events being shut down. We object to their omission from or denial in school textbooks. We seek acknowledgement of the realities and paths to a better future.    

 

It’s time to tell our truths too, the whole truth and start the process of relieving ourselves of the burden of hiding the truth. Acknowledge violent land theft, massacres and brutality used on traditional inhabitants to force submission to our forebears will, and take their land.

 

It’s time to acknowledge First Peoples’ resistance to that violence and theft. Their defence of their sovereignty and country is their human right. 

 

It’s time to support First Peoples whenever and however they strive to exercise that right to sovereignty and land, as is their right.

 

Then other Australians can find a solid foundation of a fair and truthful relationship to be able to walk together into the future.

January 26: sovereignty never ceded

 Written by: Central Committee, CPA (M-L) on 26 January 2021

Statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australian (Marxist-Leninist)

On January 26, we acknowledge that what is known as Australia is stolen land, enforced by brutal massacres across its length and breadth. Such massacres should be unspeakable. Yet they must be spoken.

Our Party Program quotes a Kuku Yalanji man. 
“The tap root of invasion is based on four principles, asserted to this day. It says to First Peoples:

‘You are not who you say you are.’
‘You don’t belong here.’
‘This is not your land.’
‘You must be like us.’

The forces of the state enforce this. 

In almost every community where they live in numbers, First Peoples’ youth are routinely harassed and subject to violence by police. Some are murdered or die through casual criminal neglect in custody. Mothers are threatened with removal of their children. No wonder increasing numbers lose hope. Sorry business is epidemic across the lands. 
 
An avalanche of sophisticated, well-researched lies builds on these four principles. It benefits only the imperialist inheritors of invasion, the giant multinational corporations which give “governments” their orders. 

January 26 is manufactured as OUR day, though it was once only celebrated in the NSW colony. Nearly half this land’s people are alleged to oppose the change of date. This survey is meant to break First Peoples’ spirits. 

As Marxists, we cannot wish this away. But surveys are easily manipulated to come to such conclusions. 

More importantly, and what must be built on, is the over fifty per cent who say, “It’s got to go!” even though they know it will not of itself solve the challenges First Peoples face. But it is an important step that will give hope.

Sovereignty was never ceded. British invasion was everywhere resisted. British military power was kept in place again and again sometimes for decades, in every First Peoples’ Country they dared to enter. This truth is the way forward, for resistance has not ended.  

“For First Peoples, decolonisation reaffirms who they are and where they belong. It places them in their Country. It affirms their identity.” (Party Program, quoting a Kuku Yalanji man)

From Country, Elders have invited First Peoples and allies to stand together in protest on January 26.

We join them. We salute their bravery and resistance.