April 12.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Official and individual violence
“...a 'score of armed men, Constables, Soldiers and Civilians...fell in with the Natives ... [and] they reported killing some two score.”
By the end of February 1827, [Governor] Arthur had established 'several of the different outposts of military and field police', which the Hobart Town Gazette believed would 'effectively prevent the future attacks of the natives upon the stock-keepers in the remote parts'. [1] But some settlers preferred to take the law into their own hands. Michael Steel, a settler at Macquarie Plains, told his brother, 'we fell in with [Aborigines] and poured strong fire into them and killed their leader and one more...[H]ad the country been even and clear we should have killed or taken the whole of them.' [2] In other cases joint action was more effective. In March, at Great Swanport, now Swansea, on the east coast, when a group of Oyster Bay men, possibly led by Tongerlongter, killed a servant of settler James Buxton, a 'party' was 'sent out' after them and that night they killed several Aborigines at their camp. [3] On 12 April, when another group of Oyster Bay Aborigines killed two convict servants, Thomas Rawling and Edward Green, assigned to settler Walter Davidson on his property at the Elizabeth River not far from Campbell Town, near Mount Augustus, a 'score of armed men, Constables, Soldiers and Civilians and...assigned Servants...fell in with the Natives when they were going to their Breakfast. They fired volley after volley in among the Blackfellows, they reported killing some two score.' [4]
HTG, 24 Feb. 1827.
Dow and Dow, Landfall in Van Diemen's Land, 45.
TAHO CSO 1/316, 840; Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, 99.
George, 'Extracts from a diary belonging to James George', 13: CT, 4 May 1827.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 90, 369 n.12, 13, 14 and 15.
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Jack Watson was one of the most violent men on the northern frontier...
In his article 'Home decor and dance', N. Thomas contends that 'the business of simultaneously exhibiting and exterminating natives is consistent with the enduring invasive logic of a settler-colonial nation'. [1] Reading this perspicacious insight back into the northern Australian frontier of the 1880s and 1890s, we find a frontier home décor of ghastly dimensions. Jack Watson was one of the most violent men on the northern frontier in the 1880s and 1890s. He managed Lawn Hill in 188s, and Mrs Emily Creaghe, who was in the Lawn Hill region then, wrote in her diary [of this man’s macabre practices] that, 'Mr Watson has 40 prs of black's ears nailed around the walls [of the homestead]… [2]*
Watson had a wide reputation for being 'hard on the blacks', as they called it then. In 1895 he became manager of Victoria River Downs Station, remaining there until his death the next year.
N. Thomas, 'Home décor and dance: the abstraction of Aboriginality' in R. Coates and H. Morphy (eds), In place (Out of time): contemporary art in Australia, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1997, 24-28.
Emily Creaghe, Diary 8-2-1883, Mitchell Library, Mss 2982.
Acknowledgment: Deborah Bird Rose, “Aboriginal life and death in Australian settler nationhood' in Aboriginal History, Volume 25, 2001, pp. 149, n.8, n.9.
* See a fuller entry in Emily Creaghe’s diary on Jack Watson noted in the excerpt for 8 February.