August 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘Wonderful invasion’ but also brutality
‘This wonderful invasion'
Running side by side with these frank and patronising accounts of dispossession were equally frank admissions of the brutality of the frontier wars, yet with one important difference: the triumphant tone of 'this wonderful invasion' was accompanied by disquiet, sympathy and regret, occasionally bordering on guilt. This way of responding to the reality of the frontier began with the first years of settlement in Eden-Monaro and survived even during the height of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century.
Exposing the true nature of British colonisation was always easier for those who were not British. When the Austrian John Lhotsky passed through the Monaro in the 1830s he condemned the English approach to 'Aborigines' as 'a cheap and easy philanthropy'. 'I consider the extinction of an entire race...as one of the greatest blames of all the different governments...in these colonies [more often]...owing to the whites and not to the blacks'. [1] Lhotsky's fellow countryman, Baron Charles Von Hugel, was no less scathing shortly after he visited Twofold Bay in 1834:'With very few exceptions, the Englishmen living [in the colony of New South Wales] show no sympathy whatever for the New Hollanders, about whom they know only that they are black, live in the woods and are useless as labour'. [2]
When George Augustus Robinson travelled through the far south coast in 1844, he reflected in his journal on the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people. After listing the vices and diseases which Aboriginal men and women had 'contracted [through] European barbarity and cruelty', Robinson asked forlornly, 'What have we Europeans to say to these wrongs?' [3]
Many men like Lhotsky, Von Hugel and Robinson, who moved widely through the frontier, witnessed the suffering of Aboriginal people at close hand. The tradition these men represent, of lamenting the effects of colonisation on indigenous people and castigating British settlers for their unjust treatment of Aboriginal people, probably has its origins in the raw emotional power of the stories told by the men and women who confronted the human tragedy of dispossession. This legacy could be denied or transferred to others, or even legitimised as the collateral damage of colonisation, but it could not be extinguished.
JLA Lhotsky, Journey from Sydney to the Australian Alps, Sydney, 1835, pp. 19, 44. See also John Lhotsky, Illustrations of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Colony of NSW, Sydney, 1835 p.12.
Dymphna Clark (ed) Baron Charles Von Hugel: New Holland Journal November 1833-October 1834, MUP, 1994, p. 417.
Robinson Journal, 7 August 1844. See also JP Townsend, Rambles and Observations in NSW, London, 1849, pp. 119-20.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas's Point, pp. 75, 242 n.35, n.36, n.37.
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Examples of “summary punishment” in South Australia
Samuel Stuckey, the pastoralist whose fatal shooting of Pompey had been taken as ‘justifiable homicide’, recalled making ‘a useful man’ out of one Aboriginal man by chaining him to an iron casting for three days before releasing him. [1]
Reports of this sort of summary punishment arose commonly on other frontier districts. After sheep were stolen from James Thompson’s run on Eyre Peninsula in October 1861, the owner gathered a group of six or seven Aborigines together with the promise of a ‘big breakfast’, but instead of being given food they were surrounded by station workers and beaten with sticks. An ex-policeman who reported the incident claimed that one man was held by the overseer and ‘beaten until he was nearly dead’. [2] In December 1863 two station workers named Barton and miller on a property near Venus Bay thrashed an Aboriginal man so badly that he died. The men were put on trial for the death, but the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
Samuel Stuckey, ‘Reminiscences’, undated, A 1083 A, State Records Office of South Australia SRSA
Government Record Group (GRG) 5/2/1861/980, SRSA.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 110, 201 n.31, n.32.