April 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
No Treaty – but Dispossession
The British government did not offer [Indigenous people] a treaty.
[Thus] Eurocentric English misconceptions, the only ones known to the British government when the First Fleet was being assembled, implied that Aboriginal people, not being farmers, were not sovereign owners to be offered treaties. Two prevailing views of the international law of possession had existed in the late eighteenth century. One held that a people's presence on land gave them ownership, so that all occupiers – even hunters and gatherers – were owners. Another subset of this view was that both Indigenous owners and those who settled had shared rights of a land. However, the other view argued that land was 'waste' until people acquired property rights through mixing their labour with the soil. The British government, influenced by Cook and Dampier, viewed non-farming Aboriginal people as not owning land, and therefore did not offer them a treaty. [1] This infringed the rights of Aboriginal people and lowered respect for them from that moment on.
See H. Reynolds, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, chap. 1.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians, – A history since 1788 pp. 18-19, 352 n.6.
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Dispossessed of their land…
When the penal colony of Moreton Bay was founded in 1824 there was an estimated population of 5,000 Aboriginal people. The white population and Aboriginals coexisted in an uneasy relationship and even into the 1850s there were groups of Aboriginals living in camps to the north and south of the town. A curfew had been imposed prohibiting their entry into the [white] settlement after 4 pm and on Sundays. After the Moreton Bay area was opened for free settlement in 1842, Aboriginal people were rapidly dispossessed of their land, food and water. Their situation became so desperate by 1860 that a parliamentary Select Committee was formed to report on their condition and it was found that ' No natives are seen about the settlement. This is owing to their being driven off as much as possible'.
Acknowledgment: Kay Cohen, Val Donovan, Ruth Kerr, Margaret Kowald, Lyndsay Smith, Jean Stewart, Lost Brisbane and Surrounding Areas 1860-1960, The Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Brisbane, 2014, p.220
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...there is sufficient documentary evidence of a trade in stolen Aboriginal children by police and others.
In 1865, grazier Charles Scott wrote (referring to Inspector George Murray), ‘Murray has brought up a black gin [sic] for Charlie, rather a nice little one’. [1] Fellow pastoralist W.H. Corfield, writing of Cookton [in north Queensland] in the 1870s, said [Stanhope] O’Connor’s troopers ‘picked up’ a ‘little fellow about six years of age’ when ‘dispersing some blacks’. [2] ‘Knowing I had no blackboy, Corfield said, O’Connor ‘gave me the little fellow’. Alfred Henry, police magistrate at Normanton in 1874, reported that the ‘running down and forcible detention of gins [sic] and children’ was ‘a recognised custom’ in the district. [3] Henry, a former Native Police officer, enclosed a list of cases with his report. ‘The mere fact of having a black boy or gin [sic] as a servant is no offence’. The “forcible detention” or “running down” is a very difficult thing to prove.’ Apparently nothing was done about the practice.
Charles Scott to Walter Scott (26 September 1865), W.J. Scott Papers, Sir James Scott, Hants, England, Australian Joint Copying Project, Microfilm M/2475.
Corfield, Reminiscences, 59.
Normanton Police Magistrate to Colonial Secretary (28 October 1874), Colonial Secretary’s Correspondence, COL/A200, letter 2424 of 1874.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 p.173, 288 n.93, n.94, n.95.