A rigorous truth-telling
Renowned Australian social historian, Raymond Evans, has authored a ‘rigorous truth-telling’ of Sir Samuel Griffith for his latest work, Samuel Griffith and Queensland’s ‘War of Extermination’. The essay is published online in collaboration with The Supreme Court Library Queensland.
An excerpt
Sir Samuel Walker Griffith—savant, statesman, jurist, constitutionalist and more—has of late been subjected to a considerable critical drubbing. A very tall Australian historical poppy appears in the process of being lopped or at least, substantially pruned. His individual part is woven into what emerges more and more to modern eyes as a shocking, unconscionable record of dispossession-mayhem, erupting across the entire continent; but particularly intense and unrelenting as it manifested itself in serial genocidal episodes along the entire Queensland frontier over the best part of a century.
About the author
Raymond Evans (Dr/ Adjunct Prof.) is an internationally known, award-winning Australian social historian. He has contributed many pioneering works of history to scholarship across a wide range of thematic areas. One of these major specialisations is Australian race relations studies, particularly concerning frontier and post frontier contact/conflict history, especially in Queensland. This latter study has been conducted across many decades, beginning in 1965 with one of the earliest researched theses into Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal frontier relations in Australia, with similar published work beginning in 1971.
Among a substantial range of publications dealing with racial and ethnic themes, landmark studies include the co-authored Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975, 1988, 1993); Fighting Words. Writing about Race (1999) and A History of Queensland (2007). His latest contributions to frontier research include the ground-breaking, co-authored “’Pale Death … Around Our Footsteps Springs’: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier from State and Private Exterminatory Practices” in M. Adhikari (ed.) Civilian Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies for Routledge, London in 2021 and “Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824-1928” in B. Kiernan (ed.) The Cambridge World History of Genocide, a milestone three volume study, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Selden Society Lecture on 22 February 2024
Legal disclaimer: This essay represents only the author’s own views as a private citizen, and not necessarily the views of the author’s employer, organisation, committee or any other group or individual.