August 9.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Casualties on both sides
“... abstain from acts of aggression...”
The settlers in the Clyde police district disagreed with [Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir George] Murray's sentiments.* They believed that they were under siege by a small group of savages who were determined to drive them out of the colony. Between 9 April and 9 August 1830 they recorded twenty-two attacks by the Big River people on their properties. A woman named Mary Daniels and her twins, Richard and Eliza, were killed and two other women and seven stockmen wounded, and fifteen huts were plundered for blankets, flour and tea. [1] Yet [Governor] Arthur was also aware that each of these incidents had taken place in reprisal for atrocities by stock-keepers, military patrols and roving parties. The settlers in the Oatlands and Richmond police districts felt no less secure. How much longer, Police Magistrate Thomas Anstey wrote to Arthur, could they tolerate the daily fear and anxiety for their safety? [2]
In Hobart, Arthur was perceiving the situation in a different way. Reports from his emissaries G.A. Robinson on the west coast and Captain Welsh in the north-east said they had each made friendly contacts with Aborigines on the other side of the settler frontier. When he also heard that Anstey's son had captured four Big River people west of Oatlands on 28 July, he believed for a moment that he had reached a turning point. [3] So, on 19 August he issued the following government notice:
It is with much satisfaction that the Lieutenant-Governor is at length enabled to announce that a less hostile disposition towards the European inhabitants has been manifested by some of the Aboriginal Natives of the Island, with whom Captain Welsh and Mr G. A. Robinson have succeeded in opening a friendly intercourse...his Excellency earnestly requests, that all settlers and others will strictly enjoin their servants cautiously to abstain from acts of aggression against these benighted beings, and that they will themselves personally endeavour to conciliate them wherever it may be practicable: and whenever the Aborigines appear without evincing a hostile feeling, that no attempt shall be made either to capture or restrain them, but, on the contrary, after being fed and kindly treated, that they shall be suffered to depart whenever they desire it. [4]
Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 88-91.
Anstey to Arthur, 22 Aug. 1830, TAHO CSO 1/316.
CT, 30 July 1830.
BPP, 'Van Diemen's Land', 61.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 128-129, 372 n. 20, n.21, n.22, n.23. For an extract immediately following this one, see entry for 27 August.
* For Sir George Murray's views, see entry for 30 July.
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Telling the truth shouldn’t take so long.
From all of this, we also know that Delagai, Damada, Yowan, Goolay, Warrawalla Marga, Gumbool, Newringie, the Boondungs, old Kangooloo and all the others quietly passing time on Country were run down, executed in cold blood, and their bodies incinerated by a vengeful, unbalanced pack of men. Justice never caught up with those men. [Bernard] O’Leary was critical to charting their path.
Telling the truth shouldn’t take so long.
Acknowledgment: Kate Auty, O’Leary Of The Underworld – The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre, La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, p. 226.