April 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Reckless barbarity
We are a generous Christian people – we take a continent from its first possessors, and pay them with the curses of our civilization (without its attendant alleviation) with an annual blanket and with what is, perhaps, under such circumstances a real boon – the annihilation of their race.
Acknowledgment: Moreton Bay Courier, Saturday, 3 April, 1858.
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The Planet Creek killings
The Native Police Commandant, Edric Morisset, appointed the inexperienced Second-Lieutenant Alfred March Patrick to the district [around Springsure] and peace reigned for the remaining half of the year (1861) as the Wadjingu workers on the stations helped with shearing on Planet Downs, Albinia Downs and Bauhinia Downs. However, after this interlude, Patrick led his troopers in a high-handed removal of black station-workers, particularly at Christopher Rolleston's Albinia Downs, where he ordered members of the Gayiri off and followed them up with his troopers. Patrick claimed he then came across 70 Aboriginals and was attacked, although Frederick Walker wrote to the Colonial secretary stating that the 'peace was broken by the Native police under Mr Patrick, attacking and killing and wounding several of the friendly blacks at Mr Rolleston's station'. [1] This became known as the Planet Creek killings. There is no record of how many were killed or wounded, but the peace had been irretrievably broken.
F Walker to Col. See., letter dated 3 April 1861, Nullabin (sic) Post Office, 'Complaint of Aggression by the Native Police on Planet Creek', Queensland Votes and Proceedings (QV&P), 1862 (for 1861).
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, p.49, 217 n.15.
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“This terror has been inspired in them by a long course of barbarous actions.”
At Bombala, on the southern Monaro, an area where historian Keith Hancock claimed that Aboriginal people 'quietly submitted' to the squatters, the evidence available in some of the earliest local newspapers suggests that the settlers were fully aware of the manner in which the land had been made their own. In an editorial in one Bombala paper in 1863, little more than thirty years after the first squatters reached the Monaro, the editor described the fate of the Aboriginal people on the Monaro in graphic and candid language:
People generally look upon the savages of our country as a race to whom is folly to show mercy. On the outward stations they are almost invariably treated with reckless barbarity. A gun is levelled at them as soon as they make their appearance on the run...The blacks entertain the greatest dread of the whites. This terror has been inspired in them by a long course of barbarous actions.
Although the editor was keen to point out the callousness of the squatters 'in the North' of Australia, his comments were not specific to one geographical area. Nor did he make any attempt to dissociate the Monaro from what he described on several occasions as the general pattern of 'reckless barbarity'. [1]
Monaro Mercury and Cooma and Bombala Advertiser, 3 April, 1863.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, pp. 74, 242 n. 32.