DF Whom from quills heard promises carried out imperial wills on horseback. Their duty unto the crown served but purpose for the loss. A sedative for the pain that cannot be undone.
AR [Sung] Some men run from a faith they can't avoid.
All men choose the path they walk.
BS You know, as Indigenous peoples we exist in every sort of facet of the colony on both sides. So, if we're the prisoner, we’re the prison guard. If we're the young person that's in a youth prison, we're the youth worker as well, you know. If we’re the schoolteacher, we're the student, you know what I mean? We have to play our roles within them to survive. As bad as it was, there was nothing that could change that organisation within that period of time. You know, so, if all the blackfellas took off and cruised, like they would have got another bunch of blackfellas. You know, so, it's this organisational sort of system thing that carries out the work of the colony.
HB I do think a lot of documents were destroyed, so it was easy for that history to become invisible. And I think the job that they did was so essential to white settlement, so white settlers needed them to be able to, you know, assert those territories. As soon as they’d done the job for them, they wanted them to leave and disappear so that they would not think about that aspect of their presence there. So, I think they were deliberately forgotten by the people who used them, but also deliberately erased from history. So, I think it was a deliberate process of forgetting them because they were so essential to the colonisation of Queensland. They were a tool that was used and then the point politically was to erase them from that history, so that it became a different story about white settlement. And that’s why we have the sorts of, you know, white hero men that we do – we usually put on plaques and statues and the histories of Queensland that tell stories about its wonderful pastoral industry and its mining wealth and whatever. Whatever the stories are that, that you know, are about progress and civilisation and all those sorts of ideals.
BS That’s what the colony does. You know, it eats you up and chews you out and spits you out. There is no appreciation in the colony, especially when we work for it - at their benefit, but it's always at our detriment. I guess that's just the dirty work and nobody wants to know about that. So, maybe that's why we don't necessarily know about the Native Mounted Police just because it’s so brutal. You know, they want us to think that they got this continent very peacefully, but it wasn't the case. And they also don't want us to realise that our mob just didn't survive because of, you know, they wanted us to survive. We survived because we survived. We survived because of our warriors and what we did. And we survived because of the knowledge of Country and everything else as well. So, that's why we don't know too much about this time, which was so brutal. And as they say, history is when the victors tell their side of the story. So that's why we're only finding out about this now. And you know, I think if we knew more about it, there would be a consciousness shift in terms of how people think and maybe how people feel towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as well.
