BOUQUETS
I am blown away by your book. So detailed, so shameful. I have never seen so many actual documents from the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, all admitting that shooting, “dispersing’, and other euphemisms are the only “solution”.
What plans to get this book out into the world? It is hugely important.
- Penelope Nelson, poet & author, Sydney.
A richly documented study of the pastoral occupation.
- Professor Raymond Evans, Selden Lecture, Queensland Supreme Court, 22 February 2024
After a long campaign in Australia in 2023 over constitutional change and recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Australian constitution, reading Wal Walker’s The Squatters’ Grab is a sobering experience…
The title says it all… Settlement was about land…determining the drama of possession and dispossession that would haunt Australian development over the next two centuries and beyond…
It is Wal Walker’s achievement to have recorded - from the archives- the intimate details of how this played out. Possibly one of the best recorded examples of colonisation and its effect on native people…
Wal Walker has produced a hefty study of one of Australia’s most haunting issues…The forces that clashed – Indigenous against European; enlightened individuals against greedy property developers; far sighted governors against the tide – all were left to make a go of it in a continent that stretched from the Torres Strait to the Southern Ocean in the days before any sort of telecommunication. It is a tale of colonialism, but it is also the story of Australia.
- Anne Henderson, author, historian, Deputy Director of the Sydney Institute
I have read a lot of Indigenous peoples’ history here in the U.S. over recent years.
Your book provides more and better detail on the regular pattern of the governments of the colonists making and breaking of treaties and laws, whether negotiated or imposed on different tribes or Indigenous settlement areas.
Yours is the best book I've seen on Australian history of the land grabs. Hearty congratulations!
- Fred Collignon, Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
Thank you for writing the book Wal, it could be required reading for Australian citizenship and schooling.
As a teenager I was shown the holes in the wall of the old building on Camboon Station where the ancestors had "bravely" defended themselves against the aboriginal attackers.
It has taken me half a lifetime to realise our Australian story is another brutal colonisation by the English and Europeans generally. What a brainwash!
- Angus Young, Dicky Beach, Queensland
ABOUT THE SQUATTER'S GRAB
Millions of Australians who voted in the October 2023 referendum have little knowledge of the history of our relations with the traditional owners.
The Squatters’ Grab confronts the great Australian silence about the history of our relations with the traditional owners, the cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale described by Bill Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lecture. More than fifty years later there was still no comprehensive account of the failures of governments and their administrations that gave rise to the murder and dispossession of the Indigenous Australians.
The Squatters’ Grab bridges this gap, examining laws enacted in London by King, Queen, Parliament and Secretaries of State for the Colonies, relating to Indigenous Australians. Detailing how the law failed Aboriginal Australians so drastically, and for so long; failing to acknowledge they had rights in their own country, denying them access to their land and sources of food and water; denying them the right to appear in Court, to bring a charge or to defend themselves; treating them as enemy aliens, not citizens entitled to the rule of law.
The Squatters’ Grab records the voices and experience of explorers, settlers and Aboriginals as the frontiers of settlement pushed rapidly out from Sydney, west then northward across the country. We meet those who recognised, respected and supported Indigenous people, as well as the perpetrators of violence. Wal Walker considers whether settlement could have progressed cooperatively, without the extensive loss of Indigenous lives.
The Squatters’ Grab examines the British experiment in Queensland, a new colony with a small white population, with inadequate finance, little expertise and growing violence, given its own Parliament at separation; how its foundation document, the Order in Council signed by Queen Victoria, was disobeyed, overwhelmed from the first by the squatters interests in collusion with the Governor and his Premier.
The Squatters’ Grab considers the failure of governors, governments and administrations in the establishment of the Colony of Queensland. How its Native Police force, given relatively unfettered powers to “disperse” Indigenous Australians, entrenched a culture of mutual fear, mistrust and dispossession. We are told that Queensland Native Police protected the squatters, not how they were placed at their disposal to disperse and massacre Indigenous people, ensuring squatters could take over Aboriginal country without being held responsible for the violence and murder.
The Squatters’ Grab deals honestly with our past, it provides a history of the laws and administrations that failed Indigenous Australians. It is a book for the majority of Australian who have never found a clear and informative answer to what went wrong between the settlers and the First Australians. It is a resource for teachers and students across the country who are finally being given a curriculum that deals honestly with our past.
The Squatters’ Grab attempts to unravel why and how it all went so wrong!
BUY THE SQUATTER'S GRAB
Paperback, 486 pages, 6 Maps, Footnotes and Index, Price: $36.95
ISBN: 978-0-646-9970-6
The Squatters’ Grab is available from this website and all good bookshops around Australia:
ACT:
Paperchain, Manuka, 2603
National Library Bookshop, Canberra
New South Wales:
Abbey’s Bookshop, York Street, Sydney, 2000
Booktopia, Rhodes 2138
Constant Reader, Crows Nest, 2065
Dymocks, Parramatta, 2150
Gleebooks, Glebe, 2037
State Library of NSW Bookshop, 2000
Queensland:
Book House, Noosaville, 4566
Books@Stones, Stones Corner, 4120
Dymocks, Brisbane, 4000
State Library of Queensland, Bookshop, 4101
Mary Ryan, New Farm, 4005
Riverbend, Bulimba 4171
Victoria:
Aesops Attic, Kyneton
Collins Swan Hill, 3585
Readings, Melbourne, 3000
Royal Historical Society, Melbourne 3000
Stoneman’s Bookroom, Castlemaine 3450
Tasmania:
Dymocks, Hobart, 7000
Western Australia:
Crow Books, Victoria Park, 6101
Dymocks, Perth, 6000
New Edition, Fremantle, 6106
Paperbark, Albany, 6330
BIO
Wal Walker is an economist; born in Sydney, he lived for ten years in Queensland and for several years in the Northern Territory. He has a long standing interest in the history of New South Wales and Queensland and that of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Members of both sides of his family have been involved in progressing the welfare of Indigenous Australians.
Wal Walker has published two volumes of early Australian history that focus on life in New South Wales under the first seven governors. His interests include international economics, energy and environmental issues and literature.
CONTACT
Individuals or interest groups, such as historical or family history societies, schools, colleges, libraries and others wishing to arrange an author talk, please contact Wal Walker using the form below.