We should hear the full story of our dark past

SOME basic research for a child’s project led to a shocking discovery about John Batman, our city’s founder. But why wasn’t it more widely known?

UNTIL last week I thought I had a solid understanding of our early pioneers and the actions that put them on the historical map.

Then what seemed a simple child’s project on the history of Melbourne shocked me from complacency.

My son had to research six key figures who shaped Melbourne, so I joined in the reading. Of course, when you’re researching Melbourne history, you start with its founder, John Batman.

I know his statue; a purposeful man in Victorian farming garb, up off Collins St. I’ve seen his memorial at the Vic Market, on which was inscribed: “Born at Paramatta in 1800 ... he entered Port Phillip Heads in May 1835 as head of an expedition which he had organised in Launceston to form a settlement and founded one on the site of Melbourne, then unoccupied.”

Leaving aside the laughable line about the land being “unoccupied” (of course the Wurunjeri people’s home was the area Batman named “a place for village”), what snapped me out of my ignorance was a Google search of the man whose name is on one of the town’s main arteries.

Batman sailed here as a successful Tasmanian grazier and explorer. That much I knew. That he made his name in Tasmania by enthusiastically contributing to the genocide of Aborigines, including playing judge and jury to two men wounded in one of his raids — and deciding it was too hard to get them on to ponies so he should shoot them — was horrific news to me.

Here is some of how Batman described that raid on a group of Aboriginal families (said to be 60 to 70 people) carried out at their camp, at 11pm in September 1829 in the Ben Lomond district of north-eastern Tasmania:

“(The group) Were in the act of running away into the thick scrub, when I ordered the men to fire upon them, which was done, and a rush by the party immediately followed, we only captured that night one woman and a male child about two years old, the party was in search of them the remainder of the night.

“The next morning we found one man very badly wounded in his ankle and knee, shortly after we found another 10 buckshot had entered his body, he was alive but very bad, there was a great number of traces of blood in various directions and learned from those we took that 10 men were wounded in the body which they gave us to understand were dead or would die, and two women in the same state had crawled away, besides a number that was shot in the legs.

“On Friday morning we left the place for my farm with the two men, woman and child, but found it quite impossible that the two former could walk, and after trying them by every means in my power, for some time, found I could not get them on. I was obliged therefore to shoot them.”

That is from his letter of September 7, 1829, to police magistrate Thomas Anstey. An estimated 15 Aboriginal people died that night.

Batman wrote to a Colonial official that he had sent the woman to Campbell Town jail and kept her child “to rear it”.

Yet if you read many of the references to Batman — who reinvented his image, with mixed success, as someone “sympathetic” to Aboriginal people once he crossed Bass Straight — there is little to no detail about what he did apart from claim much of the land where Melbourne and Geelong now stand.

The City of Melbourne’s website lists the “enterprise the foresight” of founders (namely Batman). The Dictionary of Australian Biography skims Batman’s eight years in Tasmania and concentrates on the four years he spent in Melbourne before dying of syphilis.

Yet according to some, including the Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne, too much about indigenous culture is already taught and a less politically correct approach is needed. To be fair, some of the examples of exercises for teaching maths and indigenous culture simultaneously sound ridiculous.

BUT beyond the debate about education paradigms and political correctness, the real issue is finding out why there are these gaping holes in our understanding of ourselves.

My children spent four years in a state primary school and left with only the vaguest knowledge of indigenous experience.

I don’t want guilt, shame or blame foisted on to students — that’s pointless. But they have the right to learn in classrooms, and not by accident, about how aspects of our country’s past have contributed to aspects of its present.

Of course children must not be politically indoctrinated in the teaching of curriculum, nor should we set out to poison them about historical figures.

But they, and we all, deserve the skills to understand our nation. We can only have a healthy future if we acknowledge our whole past.

Join the conversation at Wendy’s blog: Blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/theperch/

or join her Facebook community at facebook.com/ontheperch