July 18.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Pemulwuy – a resistance leader
Pemulwuy
The legend of Pemulwuy is part of the belief system and oral history of the Aboriginal people of the east coast of Australia. It is also part of the history of all modern Australians. The city of Sydney is built upon his land...His story is not different in substance from that of other Aboriginal-Australian patriots like Yagan and Jundamurra. Such men resisted the British invasion and colonial rule in Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are two things that set Pemulwuy apart from his later compatriots. The first was that he led [his] people in the first major response to the British invasion, and fought the British for twelve long years until his death in 1802. The Aboriginal-Australian resistance is said to have been broken by Governor King in 1805 [1] when Pemulwuy's son, Tedbury, was captured and became the first Australian prisoner of war.
The second difference was the attitude of Pemulwuy's enemies towards him. The British sought not only to destroy him physically, they, and some of their descendants, attempted to obliterate the...evidence of his existence...Pemulwuy and the group he led were clearly at war with the British. His twelve- year campaign and persistent attacks on crops and towns were well beyond the acts of outlaws or thieves. They were acts of war. Carried out by a people who were determined not to surrender their land or sovereignty to an invader.
[Eventually Pemulwuy was shot dead by British forces in 1802 [2] and then decapitated.] Governor Phillip Gidley King, in consigning Pemulwuy's head to England, wrote: ...altho' a terrible pest to the colony, he was a brave and independent character...[3]
He was indeed their noblest enemy in Australia. Yet to the eternal shame of the British soldiers, they dishonoured his body.
B. J. Bridges, 'Pemulwuy “a Noble Savage”, published in the Royal Australian Historical Society Newsletter, 88, 1970, 3-4.
Governor King wrote that 'Two settlers shot [Pemulwuy and another native]' – Gapps, Sydney Wars, p. 154.
Governor King to Sir Joseph Banks 1802, HR NSW.
Acknowledgment: Eric Willmot, 'Background' in Pemulwuy – The Rainbow Warrior, Bantam Books, Moorebank, 1988, pp. 13-14.
____
A conspiracy of silence forced by majority opinion.
In the late 1800s, Queensland's white population was still small and the settlements that arose on the frontier were also small. To speak out against atrocities meant a very real possibility of ostracism, both socially and financially, which put a serious brake on the readiness of the morally outraged to identify themselves publicly. That there were persistent campaigns against the role of the Native Police and frontier violence is a tribute to the humanitarian element of some dedicatedly benevolent colonials. Nearly 40 years later, the Reverend J S Needham, Chairman of the Anglican Australian Board of Missions, publicly acknowledged that:
There were many well-authenticated accounts of ill-treatment of Aborigines which amounted to cold-blooded murder...There was a conspiracy of silence...Information was received that a certain outrage had been committed; but when the informant was asked to permit his name to be used, he refused. That was a common thing. White informants feared the resultant victimization. In these circumstances it was impossible to lay these complaints before the Government. [1]
Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July 1933, 'Atrocities by Whites', p.9.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp.196, 248 n. 75.