THE SQUATTERS GRAB: where it all went wrong
By Wal Walker
Self-published by William Wallace Walker, 2023.
Wal Walker was born in Sydney. He is an economist and has lived ten years in
Queensland and several years in the Northern Territory. Wal has written a detailed book on the dispossession of land and subsequent loss of culture of the Australian Aborigines. “The Squatters Grab” attempts to unravel why and how it all went wrong.
In 1788 there were approximately 700 separate groups of Indigenous Australians, speaking more than 2000 distinct languages, and their country extended over all States and Territories and had been like that for more than 60,000 years. Within 100 years, from 1788 to 1888, these First Australian communities descended into abject dysfunction, with a loss of culture and identity. Their lives were scarred by racial barriers, poverty, poor health, alcohol abuse, suicide, crime and imprisonment. Walker states that it should be “the collective conscience of all settlers and their heirs from Britain and other countries to share the responsibility for the dispossession of these Indigenous Australians”
Wallace outlines,through extensive use of official Government correspondence, original documents, settlers’ letters & diaries, newspapers and journal articles, and oral recollections, how the British, mostly Naval Governors, failed to uphold British laws and treaties. These colonial masters allowed the early settlers to occupy pastoral land that belonged to Aboriginal people. This book, with some 900 footnotes, is one of the best recorded examples of colonialism and its effect on the lives of native people and all subsequent generations.
Wallace demonstrates, with accurate date lines, how one Naval governor of NSW was replaced by another Naval governor, with often, two or more years space in between. where no one was in charge except the Commander of the New South Wales Corps (later known as the Rum Corps). So the Commander of the Rum Corps and his officers were left to their own devices, which was largely to make money, using rum as currency, in the colony and to give land grants to their fellow officers and their lackies.
The failure of the Governors to stop the land grab by the free settlers, led to the squatters’ having a dominance of power in the new colony, especially under Governor Darling. Governor Darling reversed many of the improvements implemented by Governor Macquarie regarding the status of ex-convicts, land grants and Aboriginal freedoms and rights. Even so, the massacres of Aboriginal people continued and, on occasions, initiated andapproved by Macquarie. The greatest failure was the refusal of successive NSW Governments to recognize the native Australians as people and citizens.
Janice Millard, Librarian
