August 6.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Attitudes spanning a century
“...exterminate them by the score without regard to sex or age”
In August 1868, [Frederick] Rayner, the...owner-editor of the...journal Port Denison Times, found himself defending the local Anglican minister, Rev James Jirkpatrick Black (1831-1904). Rev Black had for some time travelled the district paying (primarily unarmed) visits to local 'Myalls' in an attempt to rescue as many of their children as he could lay his hands on, as he saw it, from the bullets of the Native Police Force. Thoroughly convinced of the Christian righteousness of his mission, Black afterwards placed these children in care of good white Christians.
Rayner then went on arguing that Mr Black was not kidnapping these children, indeed he did not need to, as it '...is notorious that the number of orphans existing amongst the wild tribes is on the increase, and will be so as long as the war of extermination now waged by several is carried on. It is not at all uncommon to try the range of a Terry's breech loader [gun] on a mob of blacks, or to hunt them like kangaroos for sport, or exterminate them by the score without regard to sex or age’. [1]
Port Denison Times 8 August 1868, Editorial.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p. 45, n.73.
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A window into a twentieth century scenario.
Just as mission intervention in the remote 'North' had brought into Southern view the fishing, pearling and pastoral frontiers of remote Australia, so the rocket range brought witnesses to the Western Desert...Surveillance focused on the numbers, location and health of people whose country was in the Central reserves and in the 'open spaces' not designated 'reserve' but now zoned for nuclear fallout...
[Patrol Officer Walter] MacDougall's reports in 1951-52 pointed out to his employers the physical limits of his surveillance. What he did not know mattered: in 1952, when the government was deciding on the 'Emu' test site for the 'Totem' series of explosions, he could not completely account for the numbers and whereabouts of those between Ooldea and the Northern Territory border. [1]
It took many years for the Australian public to learn what the Cold War had demanded of the Western Desert Aborigines. The 1985 Royal Commission into the British nuclear tests in Australia concluded that the region of the Emu test site was 'not adequately monitored'. [2] It further concluded that Aboriginal people at Wallatinna station (not within the reserve) had experienced radioactive fallout from the Emu site explosion 'Totem 1', in the form of a 'black mist'. Subsequent tests ('Buffalo ' series) at the Maralinga site had affected Western Desert people who nomadically occupied the country between Ooldea (no longer a mission/reserve since 1952) and the Central Reserves: the tests poisoned the land surface, making it dangerous, for thousands of years, to roam the country for food. According to the Royal Commission, 'the attempts to ensure Aboriginal safety during the Buffalo series demonstrate ignorance, incompetence and cynicism on the part of those responsible for [their] safety... [I]f Aborigines were not injured or killed as a result of the explosions, this was a matter of luck.' [3]
Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 158.
Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 170, 173-4.
Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 323
Acknowledgment: Tim Rowse, Indigenous And Other Australians Since 1901 pp. 220-221, n.92, n.93, n.94.