August 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Wiradjuri resistance
Settlers claimed the Wiradjuri [in the Bathurst area] captured some muskets during their raids but there is no record of them using firearms in frontier conflict. The Wiradjuri's use of spears meant that they needed a large numerical advantage – estimated by settler as ten-to-one – and could target only individuals or small groups of stockmen (no more than three or four) to have any chance of success. [1]
...During May 1824 the Wirdajuri killed seven stockmen in an audacious series of attacks which shocked the settlers. William Lawson Junior wrote that, though drought had destroyed his pasture, fear of the Aborigines meant he dare not graze his animals further inland, while a letter to the Sydney Gazette sympathised with the convict stockmen in isolated huts, where 'every sound conveys to the unfortunate the horror of a bloody and cruel death'. William Cox stated that Wiradjuri 'may now be called at war with the Europeans'. British retaliation was inevitable, and on 31 May after the Wiradjuri had speared a stockman, five of the victim's workmates, John Johnston, William Clark, John Nicholson, Henry Castles and John Crear, asked their overseer for weapons and horses. They rode out armed with four muskets and a sword, but returned that evening claiming they had not seen any Aborigines. The discovery two weeks later of three bodies led to the men's admission that they had killed them in a skirmish with thirty spear-wielding warriors. The five were charged with manslaughter and found not guilty, though Saxe Bannister, the New South Wales attorney-general, wondered why, if they had truly fought a group of men, the bodies found were of three women. [2]
Sydney Gazette, 12 7 19 August 1824; W H Suttor, Australian Stories Retold and Sketches of Country Life, Glyndwr Whalan, Bathurst, 1887, p. 44.
Memorial – Cox and others to Brisbane, 3 June 1824, NLA mfm N257 Reel 6065 AONSW CSO 4/1799; letter – William Lawson Junior to Nelson Lawson, 14 June 1824, Lawson, Old Ironbark, p. 37; Sydney Gazette, 29 July, 12 August 1824.
Acknowledgment: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 57-58, 138 n.9, n.11.
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Aboriginal people had occupied the continent for over 60,000 years
I came to Kurnell late in 2017, only weeks after protestors [in August] had sprayed Cook's statue in Sydney's Hyde Park with graffiti, covering the original 1879 inscription - “Discovered this territory 1770' – with a blunt political message: “Change the date [of Australia Day]. No pride in genocide.”
...Stirred by the toppling of Confederate monuments across the United States, which had become a lightning rod for heated race-debates, journalist and author Stan Grant penned a series of opinion pieces for the ABC, drawing attention to the cavernous silence in the words inscribed on Cook's statue in Hyde Park. “This statue speaks to emptiness”, he proclaimed, “it speaks to our invisibility; it says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted until a white sailor first walked on these shores”...Grant denounced the defacement as “disgraceful” but pressed home his point: the inscription was a lie. Aboriginal people had occupied the continent for over 60,000 years. Cook had no more discovered Australia than Bennelong had discovered England when he accompanied Governor Arthur Phillip to London in 1792.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Moment of Truth – History and Australia's Future, pp. 46-47.