February 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Three snapshots
...while other explorers’ journeys cost livestock loses and many Indigenous lives
[A] critic of the [Queensland] government was George Elphinstone Dalrymple, “the father of north Queensland”, since appointed lands commissioner for the Kennedy district. Dalrymple spoke with the authority of experience, having conducted several major expeditions in north Queensland with a minimum of violence. Early in his administrative career he advocated that the Native Police be reformed “to try a new and more civilised system of treatment of the Aborigines”. However, rivalry between Dalrymple and his immediate superior, A. C. Gregory, ensured that the recommendation was shelved. A further setback to reform occurred when the Executive Council overruled its governor and vetoed funds for a mission station at the new settlement of Somerset in far north Queensland. The council’s veto appeared particularly cynical, since missionaries for Somerset had not long been dispatched from Britain. Moreover, the success of the mission had already been prejudiced by the bloodthirsty overloading expedition of the two eldest sons of John Jardine, government resident at Somerset from 1863 to 1865. (On 14 May 1864, accompanied by four natives and four Europeans, Frank and Alexander Jardine left Rockhampton, where their father had previously been police magistrate and gold commissioner. At the Mitchell River they withstood a major native attack: “Clad in tatters, wearing hats of emu skin and living on turkey eggs, they reached Somerset on 2nd March, 1865, with 12 horses and 50 cattle”, out of 42 and 250 they had begun with. A large number of natives had been killed en route.) [1]
1. ADB 4: 471, s.v. “Jardine, John”…John Jardine returned to his old office of police magistrate and gold commissioner at Rockhampton in December 1865.
Acknowledgment: Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, pp. 206-207, 257 n.8.
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...the most disastrous decision in Australia’s history.
[According to High Court] Justice Isaac Isaacs asserted in 1913 that: ‘we start with the unquestionable position that when Governor phillip received his first commission from King George III on 12th October 1786, the whole of the lands of Australia were already in law the property of the King of England’. [1]
It is hard to know where to begin. The expropriation of about 400 million hectares of land over half a continent was an act of theft on a truly heroic scale...Experience in Australia rapidly undermined the moral and legal case for the action of the Crown...[Yet] the law was impervious to change. It remained frozen in that moment of expropriation, still guiding Australian judges 200 years after the arrival of the First Fleet. And it mattered every moment of those two centuries...The original act of expropriation was by any measure the most disastrous decision in Australia’s history.
Conflict over land began with the British arrival..[That] conflict...was an irresistible accompaniment of Australian colonisation from the late 18th to the early 20th century.
Williams v The Attorney-General of NSW (1913), 16 Commonwealth Law Reports, 404, at 439, Original italics.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 49-50, 251 n.2.
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Who then were the ‘fringe dwellers’?
Who then were the ‘fringe dwellers’? The first homesteads and hamlets often occupied the fringes of Aboriginal water sources and the fringes of Aboriginal base camps. Thus European settlements might be classed as ‘fringe camps’.
Acknowledgment: Ray Kerkhove, “Aboriginal camps as urban foundations? Evidence from southern Queensland”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 42 (2018) p. 164.