July 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Extensive killings
‘In time-honoured fashion members of the expedition combed the district shooting men, women and children.’
In May 1926 William Hay, joint owner of Nulla Nulla station in the East Kimberley was speared to death by the Andedja elder Lumbulumbia. The spearing followed a period of increasing tension in the region as large bands of Aborigines moved over the country at the end of the wet season resulting in an increase of cattle killing, still endemic in the Kimberley at the time. When he discovered his partner's body Leonard Overheu rode into Wyndham to notify the authorities and while there wrote a letter to his father in Perth in which he explained that he was going to 'pilot the police out'...'In officially reporting the matter to the police' he explained, “I've asked for a strong force to go out, and also that the natives be dealt with drastically'. [1] Four days later Overheu accompanied the police party inland. It was made up of the two police constables, D. H. Regan and T. G. St Jack, two special constables, two civilians and seven Aboriginal trackers. The party had 42 horses and mules, and carried 400 to 500 rounds of ammunition for their Winchester rifles. As the party cantered out of Wyndham the onlookers shouted their encouragement, urging the police to teach the blacks a lesson they would never forget. [2] G. T. Wood, the Royal Commissioner who subsequently investigated the matter, concluded that the party was a very large one to effect the arrest of Hay's murderer and was 'certainly calculated to give rise to the thought that the expedition assumed the aspect more of a punitive expedition than one merely to effect the capture of a criminal native'. [3]
Lumbulumbia was quickly captured without violence and with the assistance of several men from the Forrest River mission which abutted Nulla Nulla station. But the police party assumed a wider brief. In time-honoured fashion members of the expedition combed the district shooting men, women and children, none of whom had any part in the white man's death. Commissioner Wood concluded that Aborigines had been killed at four sites and their bodies burnt in specially constructed pyres. He believed that as many as twenty people had been disposed of. [4] The Forrest River missionaries believed the death toll may have have been as high as 30, recording the names of Aborigines who were never seen again after the punitive expedition. [5] Aboriginal oral evidence recorded after the [Coniston massacre of 1926] suggested a much higher death toll, possibly amounting to a hundred and more. [6]
Daily News, 8 July 1926.
C. Halse, The Rev. Ernest Gribble and Race Relations in North Australia, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Queensland, 1992.
Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing and Burning of Bodies of Aborigines in East Kimberley (hereafter Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing), WAV&P, 1, 1927, no. 3., p.vi.
ibid., p.xiii.
E. J. Gribble, Forty Years with the Aborigines, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1930, p.226.
R. Stow & D. Evans, 'The Umbali Massacre', Bulletin, 15 Feb. 1961, p. 46; B. Shaw & Gribble, Ngabidji, My Country of the Pelican Dreaming, AIATSIS, Canberra, 1981, p. 161.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 178-179, 265 n. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
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White patriarchy
Patriarchy was at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of beliefs that created the habitus within which policies that denied Aboriginal mothers the right to raise their children of mixed descent were formulated and implemented. Patriarchy was the basis of state power, economic rationalisation and family structures. In its most fundamental manifestation it acknowledged men as head of family, with others, that is wife and children, in a relationship of dependency. [1]
Lake.M. ’A revolution in the Family: the Challenge and Contradictions of Maternal Citizenship in Australia’, in S. Koven and S. Michel Mothers of a New World, Routledge, London, 1993.
Acknowledgment: Suzanne Parry, ‘Identifying the Process: the removal of ‘Half-Caste’ Children from Aboriginal Mothers, Aboriginal History, Vol. 19 (1995) p. 143.