February 11.
Abductions and Poisoning
Treatment of Aboriginal women
The impression that the violence [white settlers complained about] was driven by the settlers and their employees in the first instance was already in the minds of the colonial authorities. [The Reverend Lancelot] Threlkeld reported raids on Aboriginal camps and the abduction of women through 1825 and 1826. In December 1825, he told of an overseer for a road gang in Newcastle attempting to abduct a girl ten years of age, and beating her father when he tried to stop him. Threlkeld went further in a letter to [the attorney-general] Saxe Bannister concerning the reasons for the attack on [murdered settler [John] Greig:
I have not yet had one tangible instance of assault, although I am convinced of many, and have heard the shrieks of Girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the vile men of Newcastle...There are now two Government stockmen, that are every night annoying the Blacks by taking their little Girls...My wonder is that more Whites are not speared than there are considering the gross provocation given. [1]
Gunston (ed.), Australian Reminiscences, p. 91.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley, pp. 176, 262 n.11
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Killing through poisoning
North-west of Cooktown following the massacre of Battle Camp in 1873, [1] Jack Harrigan, whose mother was only one of a handful of survivors, told how, in order to seek revenge for the deaths of troopers and others assisting them, the whites left:
…poisoned flour near known places where the mob would come to water and poisoned the water in the waterholes itself. Jack said that his mother had told him that more Normanby bama [Aboriginal people] died this way than actually being shot or killed in the actual battle of Battle Camp. [2]
On the Battle Camp massacre see Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 118-119.
Personal communication with Ray Rex, email 1 March 2011. Ray was former Manager and Co-ordinator for the Cairns TAFE Ranger Program and in 1991-92 conducted a week-long fieldtrip with Aboriginal rangers and Elders at Battle Camp.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 87, 224 n.39.
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“The tendency of these exchanges was to entrench the ascendancy of the aliens...”
Three reports – Archibald Meston's 1896 Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland, W.E. Roth's 1904 Royal Commission report to the Western Australian government and Baldwin Spencer's 1912-13 survey of the northern parts of the Northern Territory – had each made clear how damaging entrepreneurial authority could be. [1] By making claims on the labour time, the sexuality, the mobility and the food gathering of natives, entrepreneurs substantially changed the routines of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who were attracted to goods that they issued: clothes, tobacco and sugar and sometimes opium and alcohol, carbohydrates such as flour and rice (obviating much hard work), iron tools (durable, obviating production time). The tendency of these exchanges was to entrench the ascendancy of the aliens and to reconfigure daily life among Aborigines and Islanders. As credible accounts of their physical and moral vulnerability accumulated, regulatory, protective authority became imperative. However, early in the 20th century, the state lacked the capacity to determine, unassisted, the quality of social life in remote Australia.
1. Archibald Meston, Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland, 1896, W.E. Roth's, Royal Commission Report to the Western Australian Government, 1904, and W. Baldwin Spencer, Survey of the Northern parts of the Northern Territory, 1912-13.
Tim Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2017, pp. 21, 473.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey