January 14.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
‘Slaughtering whole camps’
The casualness of murder
From the early 1880s Aborigines apparently ceased to trouble pastoralists seriously except in…two areas [the Cloncurry District and Cape York Peninsula] and in some places around the Gulf of Carpentaria. [1] This left a very large area of North Queensland where conflict was still occurring and in these areas the struggle was just as intense. This was well brought out by the incident known as the Irvinebank Massacre. The murder of a group of well-known Aborigines, accepted by the colonists as inoffensive, by a detachment of Native Police led to the officer and his troopers being put on trial.
..Many northerners felt such a course of action was a threat to their freedom to solve the Aboriginal 'problem' with violence. The northern newspapers covered the trial with interest but a letter to the Palmer Chronicle seemed to reflect the situation in North Queensland so well that it was repeated as the editorial of the Herberton Advertiser with the title: 'To Shoot or Not to Shoot That is the Question'. In this article the uncompromising nature of the struggle is clearly brought out.
The Native Police ought to be allowed complete freedom, the article argued, and any indiscretions excused. Aboriginal resistance might brutalise the squatters but this was pardonable. Indeed, the writer had been invited to spend the Christmas holidays on the Upper Mitchell 'potting blacks'. [2]
Port Denison Times 22 April 1882.
Herberton Advertiser, January 1885, reprinting the letter from the Palmer Chronicle, 20 December 1884.
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, ANU Press, Canberra, 1982, pp.60-61, 264 n.14, n.15.
____
Edward Eyre’s attempt to view invasion from the other side and settlers’ attitudes.
[Explorer Edward Eyre noting Aboriginal raids on settlers’ properties was not surprised] that Aboriginal people, thus dispossessed and watching the intruder ‘revelling in plenty near them’ choose to ‘rob those who first robbed them’. The responses of Aboriginal people faced with...acts of ‘intrusion and aggression’, he concludes, are no different to ‘what [those] in a more civilized state would do under the same circumstances’. [With settlers in mind, Eyre writes]:
What they duly do under the sanction of the law of nations – a law that provides not for the safety, privileges and protection of the Aborigines, and owners of the soil, but which merely lays down rules for the direction of the privileged robber in the distribution of the booty of any newly discovered country. [1]
Eyre’s characterisation of the Australian frontier is a remarkably perceptive one. He leaves his readers in no doubt that the settlement of Australia was an invasion and that violence was a routine necessity in the process of Aboriginal dispossession. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Eyre’s account is his attempt to imagine the invasion of Aboriginal lands through the eyes, hearts ands minds of the people confronting it. Such empathy is rare in the accounts of settlers; it was emotion antithetical to the task of dispossession and the violence that inevitably accomplished it.
...[A sample of one such settler’s views]...Like most of his contemporaries, [settler Robert] Leake’s sense of the role of police did not include belief in the principle that Aboriginal people were due legal protection as British subjects; patently, for [settlers], Aboriginal people were not British subjects but a ‘criminal’ class whose threats to settlers’ property – regardless of whether produced by hunger, political resistance or any other conceivable motivation – it was the government’s responsibility to suppress. In short, Aboriginal people had become imagined as the invaders, while settlers were stoical defenders of the country’s economic future.
E.J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of discovery into Central Australia and overland to King George’s Sound in the years 1840-1841, T. & W. Boone, London, 1845, vol. 1, pp. 175.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence pp. 41-42, 79, 193 n. 6.