This was how control was maintained. Not just by the mounted police or the gun, but by the quiet, bureaucratic sanctioning of violence.
A poisoned meal, a raid at dawn, a report filed away whose careful phrasing obfuscated the reality. Aboriginal lives were statistics; their deaths inconveniences noted in passing. The colony moved forward, indifferent to the blood that greased its wheels.
In the twenty-four years since Henty and Batman had staked their respective claims on Gunditjmara and Kulin land, so much had changed. By the time of the colony's founding as Victoria in 1851, its First Peoples numbered just 2,000, their population having been 15,000 at the point of contact in 1834.”
bookstodon group (npub1ny7…uv57) #Australia #Victoria
