April 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Further on Rufus River massacre
The number of deaths across all of these encounters is unknown, but the fragmentary glimpses in primary sources suggest that at least 42 Aboriginal people were killed and 34 wounded. In comparison, only five Europeans are known to have been killed and 12 wounded (Table 1). In 1842, as part of his initial journeys into the region after the Rufus River massacre, [Edward] Eyre recorded the only Aboriginal perspectives on this period, which clearly emphasised the casual aggression of overlanding parties:
The natives themselves have lately brought under my notice instances in which they describe the conduct of some of the parties...as having been barbarous and revolting in the extreme. I have no reason to doubt the statements that have been made to me; on the contrary, my impression is, that they are but too true...I have myself seen the scars of the wounds said to have been inflicted on these occasions, and I do firmly believe the assertion made by the natives ‘that, in many instances, they have been most wantonly fired at by Europeans, as soon as they have been seen, without the slightest previous provocation given upon their part, at points of the river where no disturbances have occurred with the natives, and in instances where the number (sometimes not exceeding two) could not afford even the shallow excuse of a dread of numbers’. [1]
The Aboriginal statements given to Eyre and the genealogical work associated with the First Peoples of the River Murray and Mallee Region Native Title Claim would suggest that the numbers of unrecorded deaths on the Aboriginal side of the equation were far higher, although when and how this happened is not yet known.
Southern Australian, 10 June 1842.
Acknowledgment: Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, Vanessa Sullivan and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation (RMMAC), “The space of conflict”, p. 159, n.76.
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Central Queensland context
...attitudes hardened in Central Queensland after Acting Sub-Inspector Cecil Hill was killed during an Aboriginal attack in May, 1865, three months after joining the force. One letter-writer said, in the Brisbane Courier of 3 June 1865, ‘these incorrigible rogues are becoming unbearable, and require a regular dressing down. Ordinary morality can only be driven into their obtuse skulls by leaden lessons’. The correspondent also said if squatters ‘had taken matters into their own hands’, it would, ‘in face of the terrible atrocities remaining unavenged’, not be seen as a ‘disfavor’ [sic]. Not all agreed. Ebenezer Thorne wrote in 1876:
While some squatters acted as Christian gentlemen, others, goaded to acts of reprisal and, as they perhaps put it, in self-preservation for themselves and property, surrounded by swarms of natives, committed acts which were simply scandalous. [1]
Despite claims to the contrary, the evidence clearly shows that European colonists, including those in Christian-settler Australia, killed Indigenous people when they felt it was necessary.
Ebenezer Thorne, The Queen of the Colonies or Queensland As I Knew It by An Eight Years’ Resident (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Seale & Rivington, 1876), 341.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017, pp. 59, 274 n.27.