The battle site became known as the Convincing Ground, the place where the Gundidjmara were ‘convinced’ of white rights to the land. The Gundidjmara were beaten in that battle but never convinced of its legitimacy.

The title of Bruce Pascoe's survey of Victoria's colonial history is also the name of a place: the Convincing Ground site in Portland Bay is on the Victorian Heritage Register as the probable first recorded site of a massacre in this state. There had been tensions between the local indigenous Gunditjmara people and whalers who had set up a station at Portland in the late 1820s, and the conflict erupted into violence over who had rights to a beached whale some time in 1833-34. Estimates vary but it is thought that between 60 and 200 Gunditjmara people were killed. The exact date is not known (and the authenticity and details of the event are contested) because there were only two young survivors and the massacre wasn't documented until a journal entry in Edward Henty's diary in 1835.

As Bruce Pascoe says: This is not a history, it's an incitement. Pascoe isn't an historian: he's a writer from the Bunurong clan, of the Kulin nation, a teacher, a farmer, and a researcher working on preserving the Wathaurong language. And the point is that while it may not ever be possible to verify the precise circumstances of this or any other massacre in neat and tidy documents, there is no doubt at all that the settlement of Victoria, as elsewhere in Australia, involved frontier violence. James Boyce, (who is an historian) makes this abundantly clear in his award-winning history 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia which I reviewed here. What Pascoe's book offers is an Indigenous point of view about these and other events, based on oral testimony as well as the documentary record:

I love my country and its people. While working on a dictionary for the revival of the Wathaurong language I kept turning up new information on how the Kulin Nation (the clans surrounding Port Phillip and Western Port bays) defended their land. There was plenty of unused material in the archives but more importantly I was told stories and shown diaries, letters and photos by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians which proved crucial to an understanding of those turbulent days. Few of my sources were scholars and they had had no previous opportunity to paint the picture of their ancestors' lives. From that perspective our national story looked quite different and it seemed unfair that most Australians' knowledge of their homeland was blighted by a cruelly inadequate history.

This book is for the Australians, old and new, black and white. Some might find the style offensive and abrupt but it has been written so that Aboriginal Australians can recognise themselves in the history of their country. Too often Aboriginal Australians have been asked to accept an insulting history and a public record which bears no resemblance to the lives they have experienced. (p. ix)

So yes, Pascoe doesn't beat about the bush, and sometimes his tone is abrasive and his sarcasm is a bit heavy-handed. The stories about the violence are confronting to read, and these feelings are exacerbated by Pascoe's uncompromising assertions about White behaviour.

The Convincing Ground should remind us to bite our tongues every time we utter the sentiment that 'Australia is the only nation founded without a war. It's a myth, a joke, the most ridiculous intellectual folly we could commit, and yet the point at which we could remind ourselves of the true history of the nation we avert our face and allow the battleground of our soul to be obliterated, wash our minds of memory, impoverish our intelligence with deliberate contempt. (p.94)

Reading this made me search my own posts to see if I had made, or quoted the same sentiment.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/07/10/convincing-ground-by-bruce-pascoe/ ( )