Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s frontier killing times

Radio National - Big Ideas 11 July 2013

The killing times. Cairns-based historian Timothy Bottoms has drawn a new map of Queensland, that places many more sites of massacres of Aboriginal people into the story than have ever been acknowledged before. And while he argues that this is a story of deep silences, what he demonstrates is how public and discussed these killings were in the nineteenth century. In conversation with RN’s Kate Evans, Dr Bottoms draws out his research and conclusions, while a powerful combination of elders and historians made the story live.