August 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Massacres of hundreds
“...very few [Aborigines] now remained”
Other settlers wrote to the committee about the number of Aborigines they believed still remained in the Settled Districts. Horace Rowcroft, whose property was near Bothwell in the Clyde police district, said that over the last two years he had never seen more than forty Big River people in one group. F.D.G. Browne, from the east coast near Great Swanport, said that even six months earlier he had found the tracks of forty-two adult Oyster Bay people who had crossed the hills behind John Amos's place, but now the number had dropped to thirty. He believed that only two groups of Oyster Bay people remained on the east coast – one associated with Great Swanport and the other with Prossers Plains. Both settlers were in no doubt that many Aborigines had been shot over the last two years and that, despite the apparent increase in the number of their attacks, very few now remained. William Barnes, who had a property near Epping Forest, south of Launceston, agreed. He said that most Aborigines in the Settled Districts had been killed in 'massacres of hundreds' by the stock-keepers in the outstations. [1]
Overall, the committee heard details of at least six mass killings of Aborigines and acquired information about other atrocities. But the only incident its members mentioned in their final report was the colony's founding massacre at Risdon Cove on 3 May 1804. In their opinion, Aboriginal 'acts of violence' were 'generally to be regarded, not as retaliation for any wrongs they had endured, but as originating from a wanton and savage spirit inherent in them'. In discounting the evidence of recent massacres of Aborigines, and in failing to understand the real meaning of 'the measures of forbearance' that [Governor] Arthur had implemented since November 1826, the committee absolved the government of responsibility for the war's escalation.
Horace Rowcroft to Aborigines Committee, 22 Feb. 1830, TAHO CSO 1/323, 104-6; F.D.G. Browne to P.A. Mulgrave, 28 Feb. 1830 TAHO CSO 1/323, 124-32; William Barnes to Aborigines Committee, 16 March 1830, TAHO CSO 1/323, 299-302.
Aknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 124-125, 372 n.7.
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“...wreaking a...bloody vengeance…”
[In 1867] Harry Arlington Creaghe, overseer at Albinia Downs (100 kilometres south-east of Cullin-la-Ringo) [near Springsure] described the reaction of the neighbouring squatters: they formed a posse which enacted 'fearful havoc, wreaking a terrible and bloody vengeance' and made a pact to shoot Aboriginals on sight. [1]
Harry Arlington-Creaghe, Letters from Ireland, 9 April 1867, p.29 in J Stewart, 'Emily Caroline Creaghe (1860-1944), Explorer', Queensland History Journal, November 2008, Vol.20, No.8, p. 395.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, p.54, 218. n.34.