Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times
Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times
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| ISBN-13: | 9781743434574 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Conspiracy of Silence
Queensland's Frontier Killing-Times
By Timothy Bottoms
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Timothy BottomsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-457-4
CHAPTER 1
Post-Convict Era and the Future South-East Queensland 1842–1859
We are a generous Christian people — we take a continent from its first possessors, and pay them with the curses of our civilization (without its attendant alleviation) with an annual blanket and with what is, perhaps, under such circumstances a real boon — the annihilation of their race.
Moreton Bay Courier, Saturday 3 April 1858.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Australian colony of NSW had four mainland penal settlements and one offshore settlement: Port Jackson/Sydney (1788), Port Hunter/Newcastle (1804), Port Macquarie (1821) and Norfolk Island which was re-opened in 1825. In 1824, the penal settlement of Moreton Bay was established, and moved the following year to the site that became Brisbane. It was the most isolated northern NSW settlement and specifically located to discourage convict runaways. Between 1826 and 1832, however, there were over 60 convict escapees who were returned from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay. The Commandant of Moreton Bay, Captain Patrick Logan, established a military post at 'Point Danger' (actually Fingal Head, 5 kilometres to the south, in what is now NSW), in order to recapture 'bolters'. This initially stopped absconders, but the outpost was closed in 1832.
By 1819, the British population of greater NSW had reached about 25,000, of whom 9940 were convicts (8100 males and 1840 females) plus 850 children of convicts. Between 1824 and 1842, 2300 convicts were sent to Moreton Bay. From these there were over 700 separate escapes with 98 whose fate is completely unknown. Logan's stewardship was stern — convicts suffered the lash frequently (from 75 to 300 lashes) and did fourteen-hour shifts operating a grinding treadmill on Windmill Hill (1828–29). This explains why so many convicts 'ran'. The indigenous inhabitants had little to do with the settlement, although they did aid in the recapture of many runaways and were rewarded for doing so. The only large-scale killings as far as the records show were at Moreton and Stradbroke Islands.
The Amity (Point) Pilot Station and Store was established on Stradbroke Island in 1825 to enable ships to trans-ship to the Store, so river craft could then take the goods up to Brisbane, as well as supplying pilots for those ships that wanted to traverse the dangerous south entrance to Moreton Bay. Six years later, in mid-1831, following the deaths of two whites, a Noonuccal Elder was killed and decapitated in response. Two separate attacks on the Pilot Station resulted in injuries being sustained by two soldiers and one convict. Captain Clunie of the 17th Regiment, whose soldiers had been wounded, warned the Noonuccal 'of the severe measures which would follow any acts of aggression on their part'. Another assault occurred with the result that one tribesman was killed and another wounded. Clunie responded with a number of sorties which ended with several Aboriginal deaths. In one dawn attack by the military, they surrounded a camp of Ngugi on the edge of a freshwater lagoon close to the southern extremity of Moreton Island, killing up to twenty of them. George Watkins recorded:
... nearly all were shot down. My informant, a young boy at the time, escaped with a few others by hiding in a clump of bushes. Affairs of a similar kind took place on Stradbrooke [sic], one in the neighbourhood of Point Lookout, and another farther to the south. A genuine stand-up fight came off west of the Big Hill on Stradbrooke, where the blacks were badly beaten.
The violence continued and in late November 1832, the Noonuccal waddied the convict hutkeeper, William Reardon, to death in payback for decapitating one of their elders. More clashes followed, but no one was killed. However, when a landing party returning from Port Macquarie by ship was set upon and Chief Constable McIntosh was wounded and two convicts taken prisoner by the Noonuccal, Clunie responded with another reprisal. Reinforced with more soldiers and constables after the convicts were found murdered in late December 1832, another clash ensued, this time with Aboriginal deaths. Raymond Evans has demonstrated that:
... between July 1831 and December 1832, in a zig-zagging escalation of conflict, embodying a possible ten or more violent incidents, five Europeans had been killed and at least four others wounded. Probably between thirty and forty Ngugu and Nunukul people had similarly been slain or hurt in these military engagements. The scale of violence can best be appreciated when it is remembered that normally only a dozen or so whites were stationed on the island ... These island clashes of 1831–32, along with the killing of Captain Logan in October 1830, mark the highest point of racial conflict during the convict era. Significantly, they also accord with the years in which European numbers peaked at Moreton Bay — that is, a total of 1,241 men, women and children in 1831 — and when the acreage devoted to cultivation and outstations reached its greatest geographical spread.
The shrinkage of the cultivation area of the Moreton Bay penal settlement, from 500 acres (202 hectares) in 1835 to 50 (20 hectares) in 1838 was, as Evans points out, an indication to the Aboriginals 'that the "mogwi" [white people] were at last gradually leaving as mysteriously as they had come. Doubtless it would have seemed to the Aboriginals as if their policing of the peripheries, their return of runaways and their intermittent assaults on the strangers were at last being crowned with success.' A similar false sense of 'successfully driving out the white interlopers' was experienced by the Gulf tribes, after a four-year hiatus from 1866 to 1870.
By 1834, colonial pastoralists wielded considerable political clout, due to the importance to the colonial economy of their wool exports. Ross Fitzgerald notes that:
As the overlanding settlers, the 'land-grabbers', spread like ripples in a pond, the centre of which was Sydney, the occupation of the fertile grazing lands of the Moreton Bay region became inevitable ... [Despite the introduction of a £10 p.a. 'squatter's licence'] ... The rush continued; frontiers were extended even more rapidly ... It wasn't long before graziers were overlanding sheep north from the Liverpool Plains and New England towards the Darling Downs. The first squatters in what is now Queensland owed little to Brisbane Town: they emanated from distant southern settlements.
The Myall Creek massacre on 10 June 1838 at Henry Dangar's outstation in what is now northern NSW, and the subsequent hanging of seven white perpetrators for shooting and sabring 28 Ngarabal people (old men, women and children), set in motion the white settlers/squatters' approach to violence on the frontier: they kept quiet about it. So began white Australia's 'conspiracy of silence'. If one looks at the twenty-year period from 1839 to 1859, it is possible to see that what was espoused officially had little to do with what was actually going on in the wilds of the moving frontier. It set the pattern for colonial behaviour after the separation of Queensland from NSW in December 1859 for the remainder of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
May 1839 saw the closure of the Moreton Bay penal settlement and three years later the NSW colonial government proclaimed the area open to free settlement, 'which the squatters greeted ... like the sound of a starter's pistol. So quickly was the Darling Downs occupied that, in the same year [1842], the bolder spirits hungered to learn what riches might lie to the north'. In 1843 Moreton Bay was given representation in the NSW Legislative Council.
The turning point for the Aboriginals came with the opening up of the traditional lands of the Yuggera, in the gateway area to the Darling Downs, west of Ipswich (1842) from the foothills in the Lockyer Creek valley up the Great Dividing Range to where Toowoomba was proclaimed in 1849. Led first by 'Moppy' and then his son, 'Multuggerah', the Yuggera and their allies instituted a guerilla campaign to stop supplies getting through to the new runs on the Downs. Their offensive actions culminated in the ambush of three loaded bullock drays in the shadows of Mt Davidson (south of the current Warrego Highway).
Multuggerah had organized and planned a masterful retreat. Jacky Jacky, Peter and the Limestone men, plus Multuggerah's own warriors — their Yuggera cousins — sought the shelter of a ledge some fifty or so feet above the road on Mount Davidson and took a defensive position ... [The Commissioner of Crown Lands, Stephen] Simpson, with his four Bush Constables saw ... [the warriors] moving toward the top of the range and went for the retreating Aboriginals. The twenty squatters discovered the men on Mount Davidson and completely ignoring a side spur to the ledge which would have taken them and their horses straight to the Aborigines on an easy path, they dismounted and starting a frontal attack, on foot, up the face of the mountain. Both attacks, Simpson's and the squatters', were disasters.
Simpson withdrew before another ambush and the squatters retreated from the hillside attack after several of their men were injured by rocks and stones rolled down on them. This became known as the Battle of One Tree Hill, and is important as an example of a successful Aboriginal attack against the invading white pastoralists. However, the repercussions were profound with many of those involved later being chased, harried and shot.
The actions of James Rogers, the manager of George Mocatta's station at Grantham, in stealing hundreds of sheets of ironbark from a local Yuggera village for use on his employers' run caused serious trouble. From late September 1841, nearly 500 warriors from across the Lockyer and Brisbane River valleys began attacking the newly established stations and driving off thousands of sheep. To the north, shepherds on Evan McKenzies' Kilcoy run were wounded, while at Mocatta's outstations and neighbouring Tent Hill Station, operated by George Somerville, shepherds were killed. The response was a heavily armed posse led by Rogers and Somerville in a punitive raid in late October 1841, where at dawn a surprise attack on a Yuggera village caused panic among their victims. This was later portrayed as a battle in which only a dozen shots were fired with two whites speared and several Aboriginals wounded, but we have, unusually, another coverage of events from 'a literate Sri Lankan ex-convict from Moreton Bay, George "Black" Brown', who was an ally of the clan. Historian Raymond Evans notes that Brown 'recorded a markedly different version of events from the white account ... What eventuated was more of a massacre than a fight'. Brown records that Rogers carried a double-barrelled rifle, a brace of pistols and a sword, and that as:
... the young natives were making their escape to the scrub; the Horsemen were riding after them; the natives were jabbing their spears at them ... The firing was continued about half an hour. I cannot say the numbers that were killed.
Between 1842 and 1844, on the Darling Downs, Aboriginal warriors killed thirteen white people. Hostile collisions with Europeans by 1846 resulted in an estimate by the NSW Select Committee on the Aborigines that at least 300 Aboriginals had lost their lives on the Moreton Bay frontier, and 50 Europeans had been killed, a ratio of six Aboriginals for every European.
The establishment of the NSW Native Police in 1848, and their operations on the Darling Downs, led to an escalation in the number of Aboriginals killed on this northern frontier. In the twelve months to August 1849, Aboriginal resistance was estimated to have cost the Darling Downs, Moreton Bay and Wide Bay districts £10,000, and made labour 'scarce & dear'. This acute labour shortage was also affected by the abolition of the transportation of convicts to NSW in 1840, and by rushes to the Californian (1849–50), Victorian and NSW goldfields (1851). These factors saw a marked change in contact between the convict era and pastoralism. In the convict period we do not see massacres on the scale that comes with the pastoral era. There does not even seem to have been a big reprisal raid mounted when Captain Logan was killed, the only Penal Commandant to perish from violence in office in Australian history. The attack would not be allowed to go unanswered in the pastoral era.
A series of factors marks the distinction between the two eras. In the convict period, the Europeans were not trying to take large tracts of land for pastoral use, but with the new era that is precisely what the newcomers did, and they stocked the land with large numbers of introduced exotic animals (cattle and sheep). Major waterholes were commandeered and the clans whose traditional lands the pastoralists had usurped were prevented from using them. Similarly, many of the newcomers saw their capital investment in cattle and sheep as more important than the lives of the original inhabitants. Any infringement on white expansion, be it spearing of their introduced animals, or one of their own kind, met with overwhelmingly bloody responses. Hence the 'keeping the Blacks out' policy, which only changed when the whites' fear of the Aboriginal threat of retaliation subsided and they needed to use them for cheap labour.
The Native Police force became the legitimate instrument of government policy, first in NSW and later in the newly formed colony of Queensland. The Native Police comprised of out-of-area Aboriginals had three duties: to break up — 'disperse' — large assemblages of Blacks, and at the same time to intimidate them by constant patrolling; to apprehend Aboriginal 'criminals'; and to act as a punitive force for the local settlers. Officers 'were forbidden to report in detail'. An officer who served with Queensland's 'Black Police' during the 1860s commented:
'AUSTRALIA has been won by a hundred years of bloodshed.' So I have heard more than one old squatter aver, and there is truth in the statement ... we organised a force of Native Mounted Police in the new colony of Queensland, for the purpose of protecting outside settlers from the raids of the blacks ... They were commanded by white officers and distributed in small squads in various outlying parts of the country ... [and] ... these half-civilised natives, now turned into troopers, were enlisted from different tribes ...
Official attitudes towards the operation of the Native Police were formed while NSW still 'governed' what became Queensland, and as Evans and Walker note:
Although the Native Police acted as a para-military body engaged in border warfare while in the field, no legal recognition of this role could be given, for, officially, the territory of others was not being conquered. It was merely seen as 'Crown Land' being 'settled'. Resisting natives were therefore held to be British subjects, behaving criminally, rather than being accorded status as the legitimate force of a warring people, opposing the invasion of their lands.
The colonists' sense of fear on the frontier can be gauged from letters to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. 'A Squatter' wrote from Moreton Bay in July 1842, that:
The state of the district with respect to the aborigines [sic], appears now to have arrived at such a crisis that the necessity of some means being immediately adopted to suppress outrage on their part, and unwarranted retribution on the part of the settlers, is obvious.
It might have been, but the British system of justice found Aboriginal evidence legally inadmissible. Also any court hearings were held in Sydney, not Moreton Bay, which required lengthy and expensive trips down south, where the courts were not so sympathetic towards the squatters and their actions. In the north, 'justice', as Rod Fisher has observed:
... was often dispensed on the spot, particularly from the barrel of a gun. These reprisals were rarely recorded in any detail. Yet the savage murders, ruthless raids, government neglect, legal inadequacies, court leniency, misguided philanthropy and northern sense of grievance were fully aired in the newspapers for all to see.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conspiracy of Silence by Timothy Bottoms. Copyright © 2013 Timothy Bottoms. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,List of Maps,
Maps,
Foreword — Professor Raymond Evans,
Prologue — The Reason,
Introduction,
1. Post-Convict Era and the Future South-East Queensland,
2. European Invasion of the Future Southern Queensland,
3. European Invasion of the Future Central Queensland,
4. South-West Queensland–the Channel Country,
5. Poisonings and Sexual Exploitation,
6. Early Gulf and Central Queensland,
7. The Frontier Moves to Far North Queensland and Cape York Peninsula,
8. Dark Deeds in the Northern Rainforests–the Tully and Cairns Districts,
9. The Gulf Country and Western Queensland,
10. Queensland's Disreputable Reputation,
Conclusion,
Endnotes,