ABSTRACT
Protest, even violent protest, is not new to Australia. Shaw (1972) traces the development of protest from a New South Wales corps military riot on Norfolk Island in 1793, just six years after the first white settlement. Nor is it a recent development in relations between Aborigines and white Australians. Rowley (1970), in his reassessment of the role of Aborigines in Australian history, repeatedly uses words such as resistance, guerrilla skirmishes, hostile incursions, depredation, unwilling compliance, etc., to denote Aboriginal action. And this clearly implies long-term widespread reaction against Europeans during early contact. McQueen (1973) recently re-analysed some of this material and was more explicit. He sees ‘Aborigines as Australian patriots fighting a justifiable war of resistance against the European invaders of their homeland’. These views of Aboriginal action impute a unity of purpose, if not of organization and strategy, to Aborigines over this period. Although action which whites see as obviously protest seems to have occurred only spasmodically prior to the 1960s, much Aboriginal behaviour viewed by Europeans as incompetent is coming to be recognized as a form of passive resistance. In fact, in many cases, it is the outcome of deliberate choice by Aborigines and therefore should be considered as protest.
