SIGNIFICANT DATES FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS IN OCTOBER

October holds some profoundly significant dates in the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

They tell a story that stretches from the violence of the colonial frontier to the continuing struggle for land rights, recognition, sovereignty and self-determination.

Some are dates of terrible loss. Others mark moments when generations of resistance finally forced governments and institutions to recognise rights that First Nations peoples had never surrendered.

And one date, 14 October 2023, has already taken its place as one of the most consequential moments in the modern relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.

Remembering these events is part of truth-telling.

Australia cannot understand where it is going without being prepared to confront where it has been.

17 OCTOBER 1861: CULLIN-LA-RINGO AND THE DEVASTATING REPRISALS

On 17 October 1861, nineteen colonists were killed at Cullin-la-Ringo Station, north of present-day Springsure in Central Queensland.

It remains the largest recorded killing of European colonists by Aboriginal people in a single frontier attack in Australian history.

But Cullin-la-Ringo cannot be understood in isolation from the violent struggle for land taking place across Queensland.

Pastoral expansion was pushing further onto Aboriginal Country, bringing dispossession, conflict and the Native Police, a colonial force that became instrumental in the violent suppression of Aboriginal resistance.

Historical research identifies the people involved at Cullin-la-Ringo as Gayiri and places the attack within this broader frontier conflict. Evidence also indicates that violence against Gayiri people had occurred shortly before the attack.

What followed Cullin-la-Ringo was devastating.

Armed colonists and Native Police launched retaliatory expeditions across the region. Queensland State Archives records describe Native Police and private reprisal parties killing hundreds of Aboriginal people in the aftermath.

The University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres research records individual reprisal attacks during October and the following months, including killings along the Nogoa River and elsewhere across Gayiri and neighbouring Country.

The story of Cullin-la-Ringo therefore cannot end with the nineteen colonists who died on 17 October.

It must also remember the Aboriginal men, women and children killed in the reprisals that followed.

For generations, Australian frontier history was often told predominantly from the perspective of colonial occupation. Truth-telling requires us to see the wider conflict: Aboriginal peoples were defending lands they had occupied, cared for and belonged to for countless generations, while colonial expansion sought possession of those lands.

The Gayiri people survived.

Their continuing connection to Country stands as testimony to survival in the face of extraordinary violence.

26 OCTOBER 1985: ULURU–KATA TJUTA RETURNED TO ANANGU

More than a century later, 26 October would come to represent something very different.

On 26 October 1985, more than 2,000 people gathered at the base of Uluru for an extraordinary ceremony.

Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen formally presented the title deeds for Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park to its Anangu Traditional Owners.

It followed decades of determined campaigning for recognition of Anangu rights to their Country.

The Traditional Owners subsequently leased the national park back to the Australian Government for 99 years, establishing arrangements for joint management with Anangu holding a majority on the park’s management board.

It was an extraordinary reversal of the colonial assumption that governments could simply take Aboriginal land and determine its future without its custodians.

The symbolism was unmistakable.

The land was being returned to the people to whom it had always belonged.

The handback did not create Anangu connection to Country. Nor did a government deed bestow that connection.

It provided Australian law with a mechanism to recognise rights and relationships that long pre-dated the Australian nation.

Today, Uluru–Kata Tjuta remains one of the most powerful symbols of Aboriginal land rights, cultural survival and the principle that First Nations peoples should have authority in decisions concerning their Country.

27 OCTOBER 1857: HORNET BANK AND THE ATTEMPTED DESTRUCTION OF THE YIMAN PEOPLE

Just one day after the anniversary of the Uluru handback comes a date representing one of the darkest chapters of Queensland’s frontier history.

On 27 October 1857, Yiman warriors attacked Hornet Bank Station on the upper Dawson River near present-day Taroom.

Eleven members of the Fraser household and station staff were killed.

The attack did not occur in a vacuum.

Historical accounts place it within escalating frontier violence associated with the seizure of Yiman Country and include evidence and allegations of sexual violence against Yiman women and other violence against Aboriginal people in the district.

The colonial response was ferocious.

Native Police and armed vigilante parties pursued Aboriginal people throughout the region in a prolonged campaign of retaliation.

Queensland historical records document large-scale killings following Hornet Bank. Contemporary scholarship has increasingly examined these reprisals not simply as isolated acts of revenge but as part of the wider process through which Aboriginal resistance to colonial occupation was violently suppressed.

Yiman people were hunted far beyond those directly implicated in the Hornet Bank attack.

The scale of the killing was catastrophic.

This is why the history of Hornet Bank must include more than the deaths at the station.

It must include what happened afterwards.

Whole Aboriginal communities paid the price for an act committed by particular individuals. Men, women and children became targets as colonial forces sought to break Yiman resistance and secure pastoral occupation of their Country.

Yet the Yiman people were not erased.

Their descendants survived, and Yiman identity, culture and connection to Country endure.

That survival itself is an act of resistance.

14 OCTOBER 2023: THE VOICE REFERENDUM AND AN INDELIBLE MOMENT IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

On 14 October 2023, Australians went to the polls in a referendum proposing constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through the establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

The proposed Voice would have been able to make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

It would not have possessed a veto over Parliament or government.

The proposal was defeated.

The final Australian Electoral Commission result was:

YES — 39.94%

NO — 60.06%

No state recorded a majority Yes vote.

The Australian Capital Territory voted Yes, while the Northern Territory recorded a No majority. Under Australia’s constitutional referendum rules, territory results counted towards the national vote but not the requirement for approval in a majority of states.

For many First Nations Australians, 14 October 2023 left an indelible mark on Australia’s history.

To understand why, the referendum must be placed within the much longer history of the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state.

For generations, governments made decisions about Indigenous people rather than with Indigenous people.

Aboriginal people were dispossessed of Country.

They were subjected to protection regimes that controlled where they could live, work and travel.

Wages were withheld or controlled.

Children were removed from families.

Governments and institutions attempted to suppress languages and cultural practices.

And under assimilation policies, Aboriginal people were expected ultimately to be absorbed into the dominant non-Indigenous society.

These were not merely attitudes held by individuals.

They were reflected in laws, institutions and government policies.

Against that history, the proposed Voice represented a different principle: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should have an enduring opportunity to speak for themselves when governments make decisions affecting them.

The Voice grew from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, itself the culmination of First Nations Regional Dialogues around Australia.

The Statement called for Voice, Treaty and Truth and spoke explicitly of the aspirations of First Nations peoples for justice and self-determination.

The 2023 referendum did not ask Australians to vote on First Nations sovereignty, and a successful referendum would neither have created nor transferred sovereignty.

That distinction matters.

But the referendum cannot be entirely separated from the much broader historical question that has existed since colonisation:

What place will the First Peoples of this continent have in the nation built upon their ancestral lands?

For supporters of the Voice, the proposal represented an opportunity to move away from centuries of governments exercising power over Indigenous people towards a model in which First Nations people would have a constitutionally protected opportunity to speak for themselves.

Australians rejected that proposal.

The ballot paper cannot tell us why each of the more than nine million Australians who voted No did so. People opposed the Voice for different reasons, and those differences should not be erased or reduced to a single explanation.

But the historical outcome itself is clear.

When Australians were given the opportunity to constitutionally recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a permanent representative mechanism enabling them to make representations on matters affecting them, 60.06 per cent voted No.

For many First Nations people who supported the Voice, the result sits painfully within a much longer history of dispossession, paternalism and forced assimilation, a history in which governments repeatedly decided what was best for Indigenous peoples while denying them meaningful power over their own futures.

In the aftermath, Indigenous supporters of the Voice reaffirmed that their sovereignty had never been ceded and that the struggle for justice and self-determination would continue.

That may ultimately be one of the most important historical legacies of 14 October 2023.

The referendum could reject the Voice.

It could not extinguish First Nations identity.

It could not erase tens of thousands of years of connection to Country.

And it could not end the continuing struggle for truth, justice, sovereignty and self-determination.

OCTOBER: A MONTH THAT TELLS A LARGER STORY

Taken together, these October anniversaries reveal something profound about Australian history.

17 October 1861: Aboriginal resistance at Cullin-la-Ringo, followed by devastating reprisals.

14 October 2023: Australians reject the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

26 October 1985: Anangu finally receive legal title to Uluru–Kata Tjuta.

27 October 1857: the Hornet Bank attack is followed by a brutal campaign against Yiman people.

Across more than 160 years, these dates tell different chapters of the same unfinished national story.

They tell of invasion and resistance.

Of dispossession and survival.

Of governments exercising extraordinary control over Aboriginal lives.

Of First Nations peoples refusing to surrender their identity and connection to Country.

And of the continuing struggle to replace policies imposed upon Indigenous Australians with genuine participation, recognition and self-determination.

WHY REMEMBERING MATTERS

Truth-telling is sometimes uncomfortable.

It asks Australians to look beyond the familiar stories of “explorers, pioneers and settlement” and recognise that the expansion of colonial Australia also involved invasion, armed conflict, dispossession and the destruction of Aboriginal lives and communities.

But truth-telling is not about asking Australians today to carry personal guilt for events they did not cause.

It is about accepting that the nation we inherited has a history, and that history has consequences.

The survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples despite frontier violence, dispossession, child removal, protection regimes and assimilation policies is one of the most remarkable stories of cultural endurance in the world.

First Nations peoples are still here.

Country is still remembered.

Languages are being renewed.

Culture continues to be practised and passed from one generation to the next.

And the demand to be heard in decisions affecting First Nations lives has not disappeared.

The events remembered each October therefore belong not only to Indigenous history.

They are Australian history.

Until Australia can hold both the achievements of the nation and the truths of colonisation within the same national story, the work of reconciliation remains unfinished.

Remembering these dates is part of that work.

Because there can be no meaningful reconciliation without truth.

And there can be no genuine self-determination until First Nations peoples are recognised not simply as people to be consulted, but as peoples with enduring cultures, rights, authority and voices of their own.