April 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A litany of cruelty
A massacre (that was) “a salutary lesson to the East Kimberley blacks”.
In July 1888 George Barnett was speared and killed while travelling between Fletcher Creek and Halls Creek...The punitive expedition that followed Barnett’s death is particularly notorious. [1] The death became widely publicised throughout the district with the editor of the Northern Territory Times (voicing public opinion) writing that the police should disregard any law, and ‘simply admonish them and disperse them in the Queensland fashion’; [2] that is, shoot them all. A report in The Eastern Districts Chronicle posited that a punitive expedition: ‘travelled over 700 miles [1127 kilometres]. The party found and dispersed over 600 adult male natives and a number of females and children’. [3]...In 1946 Mary Durack wrote about this incident with a little more detail than had been offered previously. She claimed that after the spearing of Barnett: ‘They [the colonist community] turned out almost to a man to participate in a massacre that is regarded as one of the most sweeping in local history. Barnet’s [sic] brother cut a triangular notch in the stock of his rifle for every native he shot with it...and the notches numbered thirty-five!’ [4] Colonel Angelo, the government resident of Roebourne at the time, later wrote of this incident:
accounts differ as to what actually happened but it is almost certain that from sixty to seventy natives there and then paid the extreme penalty. When I visited the scene a couple of years ago human bones were still to be found although over fifty years had elapsed since the massacre...The terrible vengeance meted out by the enraged diggers on that occasion had indeed proved a salutary lesson to the East Kimberley blacks. [5]
1. For a fuller account of the punitive expedition in response to the killing of Barnett see C. Owen and C. Choo, ‘Deafening Silences: understanding frontier relations and the discourse of police files through Kimberley police records’, in C. Choo and S. Hollbach (eds), Studies in Western Australian Australian History: History and Native Title, no. 23, Press, 2003, pp.128-156.
2. Northern Territory Times, 18 August 1888, quoted in G. Davidson, j. W. McCarty and A. McLeary (eds), Australians, 1888, Sydney, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987, p.120.
3. The Eastern Districts Chronicle, 13 October 1888, p.2.
4. M. Durack, ‘Golden Days of the Kimberley’, Walkabout, 1 April 1936, pp.35-36, quoted in Clement, Historical Notes Relevant to Impact Stories of the East Kimberley, p.8.
5. A. C. Angelo, ‘Kimberleys and North-West Goldfields’, Early Days: Journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, vol. 3, part 10, 1948, p.38.
Acknowledgment: Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’ – Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2016, pp. 231-3, 539 n.73, n.74, n.75, n.77 n.78
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“...slavery...trafficking...murdering...and flogging...”
In 1932, Ralph Piddington, [Professor A. P.] Elkin's student at the University of Sydney, told The World that at La Grange, a Western Australian government depot issuing rations to the Karadjeri people, he had seen 'slavery of natives, trafficking in lubras and the murdering and flogging of Aborigines by white men'. [1] Piddington explained that because Aborigines felt such a strong bond with their ancestral country, they would put up with almost any ill-treatment by those holding a pastoral lease over their land.
The World, 14 January, 1932, quoted in Geoffrey Gray, '”Piddington's indiscretion”: Ralph Piddington, the Australian National Research Council and academic freedom', Oceania 64 (3) 1994, 222
Acknowledgment: Tim Rowse, Indigenous And Other Australians Since 1901, pp. 74, 475 n.25.