August 21.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Revisiting Australian history
“Barbarities of the middle ages have been committed.”
Sporadic violence continued to trouble the colony [of West Australia]. Talk of punitive expeditions abounded. In August 1837 [Dr Louis] Giustiniani wrote to the Colonial Secretary with the information that a party of settlers 'who wish to be called Gentlemen have entered into a conspiracy to shoot the Aboriginal inhabitants across the hills, indiscriminately': one of the party had declared that he would kill ten men, women and children before he returned from the 'bloody crusade'. Giustiniani begged the governor to intervene in the name of the British Constitution, British law and humanity and Christianity. Failing that he declared he would appeal to the Colonial Office. [1]
Giustiniani wrote a series of letters addressed to Lord Glenelg which were published in the Swan River Guardian in November and December 1837. He expressed outrage at a punitive expedition which had taken revenge for the murder of five settlers. Aboriginal informants had told him that eighteen of their countrymen had been killed, or as Giustiniani phrased it, had been 'immolated to the vengeance in the most cruel manner'. But none of the victims had been tried, nor had any evidence been brought against them 'before the deadly weapons of the armed European prostrated them on the ground'. [2] Warming to his task, he thundered:
Barbarities of the middle ages have been committed even by boys and Servants, who shot the unarmed women, the inoffensive child, and the men who kindly showed them the road in the bush; the ears of the corpses have been cut off, and hung upon the kitchen of a gentleman, as a signal of triumph! [3]
In a later letter entitled 'The Logic of the Swan River' Giustiniani returned to the question of whether the Aborigines were British subjects contrasting their treatment with that accorded to the settlers. He wrote with deepening bitterness:
If a white man kills another white person, he is hung, but no innocent white man is obliged to suffer death for the guilty. What was the conduct towards the Natives? Have not Magistrates been leaders of a Bloody Crusade, running through the bush like infuriated beings, without even asking the names of the unfortunate beings? Have they not left them a prey to the birds of the air, and food for the insects of the earth? The least that an inhuman Magistrate can do is to bury the dead. [4]
Giustiniani to Colonial secretary, 21 August 1837, CSR, 55, 3335 of 1837.
'Blood and Innocent Blood Again', Swan River Guardian, 16 Nov. 1837.
Ibid.
Swan River Guardian, 23 Nov. 1837.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 87-88, 259 n.42, n.43, n.44, n.45.
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Instance of a need for revising (and revisiting) Australian history
Over the years that I knew George [Watson] he talked often of his grandfather Nyaywi and of the life they lived together around Jordan's Creek (a tributary of the South Johnstone River) in the jungle between Ravenshoe and Millaa Millaa, North Queensland. Early on, I enquired about George's grandmother, Nyaywi's wife. I never knew her', George replied, 'she was shot by Palmerston, before I was born. Palmerston used to come and shoot up a whole camp of blackfellows, those that didn't manage to run off into the scrub. He got my grandmother, had intercourse with her, and then shot her dead'…
The entry on Palmerston in the Australian Dictionary of Biography [1] includes the following: 'Respected as a consummate bushman, Palmerston was on unusually close terms with the Aboriginals whose allegiance he won by not interfering with their women and by his firmness and skill as a shot'. One part of this needs to be rewritten.
Bolton 1984.
Acknowledgment: M.W. Dixon, ‘Christie Palmerston: A reappraisal’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 21 (1997) p. 162,165 n.7.