April 5.
A note on Indigenous executions in South Australia
A deadly legacy left by Police Constable Mick Rhatigan
By the mid-1890s the Kimberley [police] force comprised experienced bushmen and their native assistants, experienced with firearms, horses and ‘bush work’…. Rhatigan and Brophy...stayed in the East Kimberley for over fifteen and sixteen years respectively. [1] P[olice] C[onstable] Rhatigan in particular had a very brutal reputation. Turkey Creek stockman Doug Moore blithely referred to him as ‘one of the best shots in the country and he missed very few blacks if after them, especially on the Osmond River where they were pretty well cleaned up’, that is, killed. [2]…
The occurrence book for Wyndham Station states that in November 1895 a large police party had been ordered to undertake a bush patrol and for several days PC Rhatigan had been busy shoeing a large number of horses for the long trip. [3]...the police party left Wyndham on 6 November, arrived at Ivanhoe Stud Station on 9 November and after tracking until 11 November, found a group deemed responsible for cattle killing. Sergeant Wheatley described the scene:
Left camp at 6.30am and followed the tracks and came upon the natives in a large lagoon, the assistants told them to come out of the water and reeds, two of them came which we arrested. [T]he rest of them tried to escape but in doing so we fired on them killing twenty men, the women and children making good their escape. The two we arrested shewed [sic] us where they killed the cattle and told us they had killed plenty; the following are the names of the two we arrested: Ginnare, Cunbiliger. [4]
This shooting was one of the single largest killings recorded by police in the Kimberley district. For the next two weeks the police party travelled along the Ord River and around Ivanhoe Stud Station looking for Aboriginal people. On 22 November the police found an Aboriginal camp where there were twenty-five women and thirty children, and twelve men whom they arrested. [5]
1. J.S. Battye, The Cyclopedia of Western Australia, an historical and commercial review, descriptive and biographical facts, figure and illustrations, an epitome of progress, Hussey & Gillingham, Adelaide, 1912, p. 528.
2. D. Moore, Memoirs, Private Manuscript, Battye Library, Cons. 3829A, MN 1237, (nd.), p.2.
3. WAPD, Wyndham Police Station, Occurrence Book, 2-6 November 1895, SROWA, AN 5, Cons. 741/3.
4. ‘Private Diary of Sergeant Thomas Wheatley, During Police Patrols from Wyndham from 6 November to 23 December 1895’, [Wheatley Manuscript], 11 November 1895, Battye Library, Cons. 1266A, Manuscript.
5. Wheatley records twelve prisoners but only gives the names of ten. The prisoners’ names were Didgebrinng, Giniring, Cullingagin, Wallabaring, Bulanine, Gourge, Coolwaring, Gangauire, Caarabang and Gillbangie. Wheatley Manuscript, ibid., 22 November 1895. 444
Acknowledgment: Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’ – Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2016, pp. 293-294, 361-362, 556 n.102, n.103, p. n.144, n.146 n.147
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Capital punishment made exclusive to Indigenous offenders.
The grimmer antecedents to embedded disadvantage are studied in Steven Anderson’s dispassionate article on Indigenous executions in South Australia, which reintroduced public hangings after they were abolished but only for Indigenous capital offenders. These public gibbettings served ‘both a punitive and an elevated didactic function’ in the frontier theatre of punishment. The ritual and spectacle of public executions was adapted to local crime scenes to graphically effect deterrence. Indigenous resistance to settler incursion was met with haphazard and arbitrary selection of offenders – often merely present at raids – who were hung as examples before their families and communities. Notably, murders between Aborigines were not punished with execution, attesting the critical role of capital punishment in frontier pacification.
Acknowledgment: Liz Conor (p.xi) referring to the article by Steven Anderson, ‘Punishment as pacification: The role of Indigenous executions on the South Australian frontier, 1836–1862’ in Aboriginal History, Volume 39 (1995) pp. 3-26.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey