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A review by archytas
Killing for Country by David Marr
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
In his acknowledgements David Marr is at his absolute best quoting friend Mary Vallentine, with: "David, none of us has another book in you".
You can certainly see why he might have been hard company writing this book, which details the terribly decisions of Marr's ancestors (and friends) with the same kind of relentless focus that they brought to Australia's frontier massacres. The book is exhaustive, and occasionally feels so, despite Marr's superb wit (one figure's situation is summarised simply with "The family called him in their letters Poor John". And nobody is entirely engaging when talking about their own family's history.
Marr is not simply summarising a family's (mostly mis-)deeds, here, however. He unpicks a story of capitalist greed, morals bendable in all directions to serve profit, incompetance protected by family, and unabated expansion of taken territory, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, but never, ever, reversing. This is where the book is the most significant for me, in detailing not deeds of just bad people, but systems that reward genocide, and theft of a continent for the enrichment of a few. Marr is clearly fascinated by the figure of Richard Jones, and while the beats of Sydney colony history may be familiar to many, they take on new life through the lens of this singular figure, who could condemn 'unnecessary' killings while authorising his own, assumedly necessary, ones. Jones' breathtaking hypocrisy - no doubt recognisable to Marr from his studies of various politicians - matters because it becomes too easy in our day and time to assume someone who says the right things will also do them under pressure. But pressure wins so often.
The second half of the book focuses on the notorious native police units of Queensland, which killed close tens of thousands of people (current estimates are at 41,000) over 30-40 years. Marr focuses on two brothers, looking at how the units operated and documenting the tally of events.
At times, the book can feel like a litany of similar events, with changing characters and locale, but depressingly similar actions and outcomes. It is hard to fault this - part of the point is that killings were depressingly routine.
Marr notes in his afterward that colonialism's story are for settlers to tell, and here he certainly delivers. As with any book about the frontier wars, it is shocking how openly discussed this was in the 19th Century, and then how totally purged it became in the 20th. That means lots of rich resources for historians to understand,and no excuses for us not to wrestle with what this collective trauma and destruction might have left us with.
Marr comments in the afterword ""I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by storytelling. But I wasn’t wallowing in my own shame. None of us are free of this past. ... My links to the Uhr brothers made the obligation to come to grips with this past personal. For a man of my trade, the outcome was obvious – I had to write their story." None of bear responsibility for the actions of others. But all of us bear responsibility for deciding how to respond to the world they left us, and the individual inheritances we all got from this. A starting point is to document what that history actually was.
You can certainly see why he might have been hard company writing this book, which details the terribly decisions of Marr's ancestors (and friends) with the same kind of relentless focus that they brought to Australia's frontier massacres. The book is exhaustive, and occasionally feels so, despite Marr's superb wit (one figure's situation is summarised simply with "The family called him in their letters Poor John". And nobody is entirely engaging when talking about their own family's history.
Marr is not simply summarising a family's (mostly mis-)deeds, here, however. He unpicks a story of capitalist greed, morals bendable in all directions to serve profit, incompetance protected by family, and unabated expansion of taken territory, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, but never, ever, reversing. This is where the book is the most significant for me, in detailing not deeds of just bad people, but systems that reward genocide, and theft of a continent for the enrichment of a few. Marr is clearly fascinated by the figure of Richard Jones, and while the beats of Sydney colony history may be familiar to many, they take on new life through the lens of this singular figure, who could condemn 'unnecessary' killings while authorising his own, assumedly necessary, ones. Jones' breathtaking hypocrisy - no doubt recognisable to Marr from his studies of various politicians - matters because it becomes too easy in our day and time to assume someone who says the right things will also do them under pressure. But pressure wins so often.
The second half of the book focuses on the notorious native police units of Queensland, which killed close tens of thousands of people (current estimates are at 41,000) over 30-40 years. Marr focuses on two brothers, looking at how the units operated and documenting the tally of events.
At times, the book can feel like a litany of similar events, with changing characters and locale, but depressingly similar actions and outcomes. It is hard to fault this - part of the point is that killings were depressingly routine.
Marr notes in his afterward that colonialism's story are for settlers to tell, and here he certainly delivers. As with any book about the frontier wars, it is shocking how openly discussed this was in the 19th Century, and then how totally purged it became in the 20th. That means lots of rich resources for historians to understand,and no excuses for us not to wrestle with what this collective trauma and destruction might have left us with.
Marr comments in the afterword ""I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by storytelling. But I wasn’t wallowing in my own shame. None of us are free of this past. ... My links to the Uhr brothers made the obligation to come to grips with this past personal. For a man of my trade, the outcome was obvious – I had to write their story." None of bear responsibility for the actions of others. But all of us bear responsibility for deciding how to respond to the world they left us, and the individual inheritances we all got from this. A starting point is to document what that history actually was.