August 24.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Resistance in S.E. Queensland
Successful Indigenous resistance and Multuggerah’s leadership
The genius of Old Moppy and Multuggerah was that they turned…traditional alliances to a new purpose: that of resisting the inroads of settlement…Lieutenant Owen Gorman, the Commandant of Moreton Bay relished the challenge to find a new road to the Darling Downs…added to Gorman’s party was…Dr Stephen Simpson…On Wednesday 7 October [1840, Gorman’s party]…were visited by Moppy…with two of his sons, likely Wooinambi and Multuggerah, some warriors and two [other] young men…Meeting Simpson for the first time, Moppy was welcoming and hospitable, as often these initial meetings are; until Aboriginal people work out that the white man was planning to take their land!
…John Ker Wilson recalled that, as soon as he tried to move north beyond the McIntyre River, Aboriginal groups wiped out portions of his stock…Wilson states he always punished them for this slaughter…[the squatter Walter] Leslie…frankly advised that …we never…hold any communication with them [the blacks] except it be with a gun or sword. [1]…He openly described how he shot anyone he thought might be attempting to spear sheep. [2] Likewise, in another letter of 17 November 1841, Leslie reports that 60 ewes were carried off, but for that we gave them what they will not forget in a hurry. [3]
[A]ccording to one pioneer – former Premier Ramsay Mackenzie – some ‘new chums…quitted the colony and returned to England because they could not defend themselves without shooting the natives and they did not consider that they were justified in doing so…’ [4]
Multuggerah was preparing for his big push. His warriors were preparing for war, and the alliances that his father, Moppy, had set up before his death, [had been extended by Multuggerah]. [the local squatters also gathered a hunting posse]…The bullock driver for Dr Goodwin…gives us the following insight into how the squatters organized for those attacks:
…Whenever the blacks committed any murder or killed any cattle, there was word passed along from station to station, and the stockmen would collect at some appointed place, and follow up the tracks of the miscreants until they came up with them, and then the blacks were killed without mercy…they came upon them in their camp…and at daylight the next morning they opened fire, and killed every one they could get a shot at, whether man, woman or child. They let none escape. [5]
It is unclear where the squatters had ‘first contact’ with the warriors…Cameron states that only…after a hot day’s chase did the Aborigines run up to the top of One Tree Hill. [6]…The vigilantes thought they were finally on the verge of victory [but] the supposedly ‘nearly defeated’ warriors completely surprised their assailants. Instead of fleeing further as the Europeans advanced, they…started rolling down boulders on the advancing foe. [7] …Every source agrees that the squatters were defeated and compelled to retreat. [8]
G. Leslie, letter 195 on 24 August, 1841, Jan Ward-Brown Papers. OM box 5273.
Ibid.
G Leslie, letter to parents, Leslie Letter Collection, Jan Ward-Brown, OM box 5273
Telegraph, 11 March 1938; HJJ Sharp, The Settlement of the Darling Downs, Secretary of the JOL.
W J B Gray, Early Days of the Big River, McIntyre and Severn, unpublished 1902, from Ms J Pollard
The Darling Downs, Warwick Examiner and Times, 22 March 1915.
Brisbane Telegraph, Echoes of the Past by Ben Holt – Outrage on a Station, 24 April 1914.
The Darling Downs, Warwick Examiner and Times, 22 March 1915. Country Life, 23 August 1900.
Acknowledgment: On Multuggerah’s death, see below Kerkhove and Uhr, pp.204-207.
Ray Kerkhove and Frank Uhr, One Tree Hill: The Aboriginal resistance that stunned Queensland Boolarong Press, Tingalpa, 2019, pp. 36,56,58,59,60,64,65, 113,123 147,148,152, 246 n.24, n.25, n.26, n.27, 251 n.31, 254 n.5, 254 n.8, 255 n.21.
Permission received from Boolarong Press: https://boolarongpress.com.au/product/the-battle-of-one-tree-hill-the-aboriginal-resistance-that-stunned-queensland/