April 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Statistics on killings
Comparison of numbers killed across Australia.
Melaityappa’s shooting is one of countless acts of violence committed by colonists against Aboriginal people. The work of scholars who conducted research in the 1980s and 1990s indicated that across Australia (including Tasmania) approximately 20,000 Aboriginal people were killed by white violence, about 10 times the number of Europeans killed by Aboriginal people. [1] Colonists were rarely tried for their crimes. In the Port Phillip District between 1841 and 1851, settlers were tried for the deaths of Aboriginal people on only two occasions. In both cases they were acquitted.[2] Nor did settlers in New South Wales have much reason to fear conviction for crimes committed against Aboriginal people; during the first 25 years of British occupation, only four cases involving Indigenous‒settler violence were tried and, of these cases, only one European (an escaped convict) was found guilty and hanged. [3] The hanging of seven white men for the Myall Creek massacre in New South Wales in 1838 was exceptional and can be understood as a direct response to the findings of the House of Commons Report on the Select Committee of Aborigines published in 1837. [4]
...In June 1849, pastoralist James Brown was tried for the murder of a blind and infirm old man, three women, two teenage girls and three babies on Avenue Range (near Lucindale) in 1848. Brown was released on bail, enabling Advocate General William Smillie to procure more evidence before Brown’s reappearance at the September Supreme Court criminal sittings.
Much scholarly work has been done documenting cases and investigating why British law failed to punish settlers for such violent acts. Detailed studies focus on specific difficulties government officials encountered when investigating crimes and the shortcomings of the British legal system. [5] For example, despite there being no doubt of Brown’s guilt in the minds of government officials, various factors prevented the Crown’s successful prosecution. Brown’s station was approximately 300 kilometres from Adelaide, the murders were not investigated until at least two months had passed, Brown burnt the bodies and destroyed much of the evidence and no European testified against Brown.[6] In their analysis of cases in which South Australian colonists were tried for crimes against Aboriginal people, Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster additionally draw attention to the prejudice and self-interest of frontier officials (who were subject to the same culture of solidarity that influenced other officials), the ambiguities of ‘self-defence’ (a cliché utilised by settlers to justify firing on Aboriginal people), the cover-up and denial inherent in coronial inquests, and difficulties surrounding the admissibility of Aboriginal evidence in courts of law.[7] They note that authorities who sincerely attempted to bring settlers’ violent acts out of obscurity were not necessarily ‘willing or even able to prosecute those acts with “exemplary severity”’.[8]
...In opening the Supreme Court Criminal Sittings on 10 September, [Judge Charles] Mann (referring to settler‒Aboriginal violence) ‘regretfully’ observed the ‘numerical increase’ in crimes of ‘a more fearful nature’ and stated that ‘happily for the province’ such crimes ‘have hitherto been of rare occurrence’. [9] Mann conveniently perceived the rarity of trials relating to Aboriginal‒settler violence as evidence such violence rarely occurred. Mann provided further reassurance to those sympathetic to Jones and Morris by immediately dismissing the case against Brown and by having a dig at the Advocate General (who was responsible for pursuing the case) by stating ‘the case was scarcely such as to require [Mann] to enter into any lengthened detail’.
Kercher 1995:7; Broome 2003
Davies 1987: 316-20; Patton 2006: 1
Salter 2008: 147
Lesster, Alan 2002, ‘British settler discourse and the circuits of empire’, History Workshop Journal 54(1): 24–48. doi.org/10.1093/hwj/54.1.24. p.28
See, for example, Salter 2008; Patton 2006; Levinson 1993; Pope 1998; Davies 1987.
Foster 1998: 215.
Nettelbeck and Foster 2010: 324‒33.
Nettelbeck and Foster 2010: 327.
Register, 12 September 1849: 3CD. Further on Mann see Krichauff pp. 34, 36 and entry on Charles Mann in the Australian Dictionary of Biography at adb.anu.edu.au.
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. 24 n.4, n.5, n.6, n.7, n.11; 25 n.12, n.13, n.14; 36 n.73.