April 16.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Decapitations
Killings and decapitations.
Macquarie later wrote to Bathurst that some people were 'unavoidably killed and wounded' because they had not 'surrendered themselves on being called on to do so', and that Wallis, 'having surprized one of the native encampments and meeting with some resistance, killed 14 of them' Yet Wallis failed to mention any resistance or call to surrender in his official report,* casting doubt on Macquarie's account. [1]
...Following Macquarie's orders, Wallis had the bodies of the two men ['Dunelle' (Durelle) and Cannabaygal], who were the only known wanted 'hostile natives' among the dead, hung on trees on a prominent hill nearby. Many years later Byrne claimed the bodies were hung up at 'McGee's Hill', possibly just north of today's Wilton road, near Appin. Byrne recalled that after the bodies were strung up, 'they...cut off the heads and brought them to Sydney, where the government paid 30 s[hillings] and a gallon of rum for each of them'.
SAR, 4/1735, pp. 50-59; 5/1161, pp. 24-36; Gazette, 4 May 1816; HRA vol.9, pp. 139-45 (Macquarie to Bathurst, 8 June 1816); SL, A773, 4 June 1816, p.21; 6 June 1816, p. 22; FF, p.242; Karskens, Colony, pp. 512-13. Roberts, p.633. For other examples of the use of terrain in retreats from armed settlers, see Bottoms, (Conspiracy) pp. 172-73; for some of the most florid accounts of the Appin massacre, see Elder, (Blood on the Wattle) p. 16; Smith, King Bungaree, p. 84; and for a more considered response, see Kristyn Harman (Aboriginal Convicts), p.22.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp.236, 306 n.9.
* For Wallis’ report of the massacre see following entry for 17 April. For a fuller account see Grace Karskens, 'Appins Massacre', The Dictionary of Sydney via dictionaryofsydney.org
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A generation later in South Australia
[Protector of Aborigines, Matthew M.] Moorhouse’s personal involvement in Melaityappa’s case appears to have sparked his ire and made him unusually forthright in publicly and privately voicing his empathy for Aboriginal people. In the first of two letters published in the Register during [Henry] Jones and [Thomas] Morris’s incarceration in gaol, Moorhouse stated ‘it is to be hoped that those who may be made murderers by their own masters will not be treadmilled on the revolver for self-defence’, [1] thus vocalising his awareness and frustration regarding the inadequacies – or hypocrisy – of British law and the reality of the pastoral chain of command. Ten days later, he bluntly stated:
The blacks were here before us ... At length the white man came, and the power of civilisation has continued to monopolise and fence in the soil, and to shut out and drive away the game, and occasionally to shoot down the native tribes. All vice reacts on its perpetrators, and it is evident there is still such a thing as ‘the cry of blood’. [2]
When Aboriginal people committed crimes, they were ‘revenging invasion, rapacity, and adultery’; they ‘are entitled to the sympathy of every man who would boast a generous humanity’. Moorhouse accused the settlers of being ‘blind’ to ‘their own permanent interests’ and boldly stated that although the ‘development of agriculture, mining, trade and commerce’ was generally understood as necessary for the advancement and prosperity of the colony (‘provincial locomotion’), ‘the blacks and whites, here, are antagonistic’. [3] In these public statements, Moorhouse cut straight to the cause of settler‒Aboriginal conflict.
Register, 29 August 1849: 3B.
Register, 8 September 1849: 4B.
Register, 8 September 1849: 4B, original emphasis.
Acknowledgment: Skye Krichauff, “The murder of Melaityappa and how Judge Mann succeeded in making ‘the administration of justice palatable’ to South Australian colonists in 1849”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 41 (2017) pp. 32-33 n.52, n.53, n.54.