April 1.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Burned like dead cattle.
Reports of slaughtered bodies.
A number of letters and reports in journals or files stored in the Queensland archives tell of settlers complaining about putrefying remains of Indigenous people killed by the Native Police. [1] Frequently statements appear in contemporary sources such as the one from 1875, that 'bodies of some of the slaughtered blacks are at times burned in the bush like dead cattle.[2]
An informer whom Carl Feilberg, the editor-in-chief of the Brisbane Daily Mail in January 1879, classified as 'a gentleman on whose words reliance can be placed', had been out in the remote bush following Native Police dispersals near an unnamed northern town in late 1878. This gentleman reported back, that after just 'one of those raids he has counted as many as seventy-five natives dead or dying upon the ground.' [3]
QSA COL/R3/63/122 re 11 Feb 1863; Brisbane Courier 15 Oct 1864; QPD 4 Oct 1867 pp.331-44; QV&P re session 1867 p983pp; Rockhampton Bulletin 1 April 1876.
AJCP, M/2427 letter from A. Davidson dated 12 Aug 1875.
Daily News (Brisbane) 1 Jan 1879 p. 2f.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p. 73, n.136, n.137, n.138.
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What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning...
Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” in The Pity of War, Orion Books, London, 1996, p.16.
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“How could a violent frontier exist between British subjects?”
The [British] colonial office, concerned that previous colonial policy had been capricious and had given licence to the inhumane treatment of Aboriginal people, insisted that they be regarded as British subjects. Captain Hindmarsh, the first governor of South Australia, made this theme the centrepiece of his Proclamation speech in 1836. He told the colonisers of his intentions:
to take every lawful means for extending the same protection to the Native populations as the rest of His Majesty’s Subjects and of my firm determination to punish with exemplary severity, all acts of violence and injustice which may in any manner be practised or attempted against the Natives who are to be considered as much under the safeguard of the law as the Colonisers themselves, and equally entitled to the privileges of British subjects. I trust therefore, with confidence to the exercise of moderation and forbearance by all classes, in their intercourse with the Native inhabitants, and that they will admit no opportunity of assisting me to Fulfill His Majesty’s most gracious and benevolent intentions towards them, by promoting their advancement in civilization, and ultimately, under the blessing of Divine Providence, their conversion to the Christian faith. [1]
Hindmarsh’s declaration that Aboriginal people were to be considered British subjects did not alter the realities of settler violence and Aboriginal resistance to invasion. A war was being fought which could not officially be acknowledged. How could a violent frontier exist between British subjects? This contradiction would lead to a frontier culture in which violence tended to be covert, and its representation clothed in euphemism.
South Australian Register, 3 June 1837.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory, Wakefield press, Mile End, 2017, pp. 2-3, 141 n.6.