Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
The white man dropped from the sun bright sky
For he envied the blackfellows' land,
With greed and revenge in his restless eye
And disease and death in his hand.
And he grasped the forest, and seized the strand
And claimed the blue mountains high…
Songs of the Carobra (1855)
You literally could not kill an Aborigine with an axe.
Toowoomba Chronicle (1919)
Idyllic accounts of South-East Queensland's triennial bunya festivals - invariably written by Europeans - seem to float like beckoning mirages above a relative historiographical desert.' The story of the bunya gatherings in the coastal Blackall Ranges or in the Bunya Mountains, at the north-eastern periphery of the Darling Downs, is largely cut adrift from the intricate race relations history of these districts, its aura of ‘romantic reminiscence’ conveniently unsullied by surrounding patterns of colonialism, racism and violence which punctuate the extended process of European intrusion and displacement.
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