David Marr is an accomplished journalist who has been writing about Australian politics and society for over 40 years. His book Barwick, published in 1980, is about the political and legal career of Garfield Barwick. It achieved the near impossible of making the life of its rebarbative subject into an interesting and complex story. His book Patrick White: A Life was published in 1991 and is something of a classic. Dark Victory, 2003, co-authored with Marian Wilkinson, was an early critique of the ‘Pacific Solution’.

So, Marr would be well aware that family history, is of intense interest to the individuals involved. But runs the risk of being of little interest to anyone outside the family. What has to be found to render the story relevant to a wider readership is a compelling intersection between the individual and the general public.

In Killing for Country David Marr finds that intersection. This is the story of the family established by a pretty distant relative. His great, great, great grandfather, Edmund Blucher Uhr. Edmund’s son Reginald ended up as an officer in the Aboriginal Mounted Police in the 1850s and ’60s. Uhr was the protégé of Richard Jones, an early free settler and merchant who acquired extensive leaseholds for sheep in the 1830s. Marr deftly paints a picture of early Sydney and the deep networks of patronage and profit running back to Britain. There was money to be made in NSW and God help anyone who got in the way.

This reviewer encountered the Aboriginal Mounted Police back in 1980 while doing research for my History honours degree. This was shortly after the publication of the Other Side of the Frontier and historians were revisiting the primary sources with fresh eyes. Marr has used many of the same sources. Such as the Select Committee Report into the Aboriginal Mounted Police 1857 – and to good effect. Those not familiar with the history of the Aboriginal Mounted Police will be shocked by the systemic program of murder they engaged in. All for making the country safe for capitalist stock farming. And it shocked contemporaries too – that is why there were parliamentary enquiries.

By following the career of Reginald Uhr, David Marr can cover a lot of ground. Reginald ended up based near Maryborough in Queensland and participated in a number of parliamentary enquiries. As well as being the subject of numerous press reports. The grim realities of frontier violence – the advocates of ‘keeping them out’ (and all that entailed) versus ‘letting them in’ and the language of euphemism used to conceal that reality in police reports and the contemporary press – ‘dispersal’ not ‘massacre’ – are comprehensively dealt with.

In Killing for Country Marr delivers a moving and well-researched regional history of the settlement of New South Wales and Queensland that deserves a wide audience. It’s near publication as the Voice referendum approached is a timely reminder of how intergenerational trauma starts.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Marr was shocked to discover his forebears served with the Native Police, the most brutal force in Australian history. Killing for Country is the result – a personal history of the Frontier Wars.

Marr brings his experience as an investigative journalist, an award-winning biographer and political analyst to the story of a colonial family. One that seized hundreds of thousands of acres of land and led Aboriginal troopers into bloody massacres. All in the most violent years of the Native Police.

Killing for Country is a unique history of the making of Australia. A richly detailed and gripping family saga of fortunes made and lost. Of politics and power in the colonial world. As well as the violence let loose by squatters and their London bankers as they began their long war for the possession of this country. A contest still unresolved in today’s Australia.