August 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Consequences of colonisation
...punitive patrols which purged Aboriginal communities were completely indiscriminate.
After the Barrow Creek killings in the 1870s in the Northern Territory, the punitive patrols which purged Aboriginal communities were completely indiscriminate. Ernestine Hill reported the reprisals this way:
Blacks have been followed up very sharply and a considerable amount of retaliation was supposed to have taken place. The innocent suffered with the guilty. A punitive expedition of police and bushmen led by a trooper named Wurmbrandt rode 300 miles herding all blacks before them from Ellery’s Creek Gorge of the Finke River to the Haartz mountains a hundred miles east of Barrow Creek. Out there and for grim and sufficient reasons [one place] is on the map forever with the name Blackfellows Bones. [1]
In the Daly River massacre in 1884, a whole group of Aboriginal people said to be the Wilwonga were ‘practically wiped out’. Ernestine Hill recorded the story told to her by locals:
The horrible crime [of killing whites engaged in mining activities] aroused the wrath of all residents and fellow miners, who set out in several parties and severely punished the natives who tried to escape by seeking shelter in the waters of the billabong. The affair took two years of ‘bush riding’ to clear up until there was a storm of protest in the south.[2]
Hill was also told that when Fred Marriott was killed in 1886 in the Kimberley at Sandy Elvire, ‘two hundred blacks’ were murdered in revenge. She wrote that, ‘trapped in the cliff of the Mary River’ the Aboriginal people ‘picked up the bodies of the dead as shields against the bullets of the white men’. [3]
When a man called George Barnett was killed at the Halls Creek goldfields, ‘seven horsemen rode out and dispersed a mob of 600 “Queensland style”’. [4]
1. Ernestine Hill, The Territory, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1951, p. 133.
2. ibid., p. 197.
3. ibid., p. 183.
4. ibid., p. 187.
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, pp. 24-25, 230 n.1, n.2, n.3, n.4.
____Hunted...maimed or killed to discourage them from using the waterholes...and other abuses
Using the colonization of the southeast Kimberley as an example, oral histories leave no doubt that the Nyininy/Djaru competed with the cattle for water and were hunted and maimed or killed to discourage them from using the waterholes. [1] They were forced to live on the rim, move to the rugged fringes of the Tanami Desert, or settle at the station camps and be incorporated into the pastoral industry. Micha recorded two methods used to ensure that captured Aborigines stayed on the stations:
Older Aborigines today still remember the time when the hard soles of their feet were lacerated by files, of the sort which are used to work horse's hoofs, in order to prevent them from running away, and still today one may see e.g. iron balls, to which black women were chained - for the disposal of the mostly single station managers and as hostages for their working but striving-away husbands. [2]
Commissioner Roth, in his report of the 1905 Royal Commission on the Condition of Natives, referred to an additional method of obtaining labour whilst at the same time enticing people to live closer to the station — the stealing of strong healthy children from their families still living a traditional lifestyle in order to have them live in the stock camps with the 'stock boys' already recruited. Commissioner Roth reported that 'pastoralists have taken most of the native boys from the tribes; the blacks come in from the bush to get tobacco and food from the boys working on the stations' and this is when their children were taken [3]
(Taylor 1988:39; interview 3; K Doohan, pers. Comm.).
Micha 1961: 673 3. Royal Commission, State of Western Australia 1905
Acknowledgment: Pamela A Smith, “Station camps: legislation, labour relations and rations on pastoral leases in the Kimberley region, Western Australia”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 24 (2000), p.80.