July 11.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Deadly practice and official rhetoric.
A stark contrast between Imperial British and Indigenous practices.
The first recorded punitive expedition in what is now the Northern Territory, and possibly the first in northern Australia, occurred in 1828 after a soldier from Fort Wellington on Cooburg Peninsula, owned by the Iwaidja people, was speared but survived…John Sweatman, the clerk on board HMS Bramble which visited the fort afterwards, recorded both the event and the effect the killings would have had on the Iwaidje.
Here [at Fort Wellington] the party again found the natives hostile and after being perpetually attacked, Capt. Smythe, the commandant, determined to try the effect of a severe lesson; he accordingly turned his people out and in one night shot about 30 of the natives, the rest flying for their lives. The consequence of this decisive measure may be imagined when it is remembered that the severest conflicts of the natives themselves seldom involve the loss of more than one life, and even that is sufficient to throw a whole tribe into the deepest sorrow and frenzy: it quite settled the matter, no more natives were seen for some months. At last two old men approached the camp with fear and trembling, but would not enter till a little child went out and led them in… [1]
J. Allen and P. Corris eds, The Journal of John Sweatman: A Nineteenth Century Surveying Voyage in North Australia and Torres Strait, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1977, pp.135, 136
Acknowledgment: Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice – A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2005, pp. 111-112, 278 n.2.
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Eyewitness to a massacre calls both Police and the Government to account.
In [August] 1884, a Melbourne newspaper [The Leader, Melbourne, 30 August 1884] published a letter by “Drover” who was camped by the Leichhardt [River] the afternoon [Native Police Officer Alfred] Smart and his men turned up looking for blacks.
They crossed, full gallop, and at the unfortunates they went. The moment the natives saw them they jumped up from their camp fires and plunged into the large water hole they were camped by. The police surrounded the hole and shot every one of them except four women and I think four children. After the battle was over the women were divided as follows – one to a stockman who came op-, one taken to a man on the Dougal, one claimed by the police, and the fourth, being old and ugly, after being knocked down by the sub-inspector of police with the butt end of his rifle, was sent with the children into the ranges to fare the best way they could. The police then came over the river, and camped for the night near me. The next morning they went off (as the sub-inspector informed me) to inquire into the reported killing of the two whites. [1] So ended the earthly career of these unfortunate blacks, dying, they knew not what for, and dying with a most damning opinion of the white men. [2]
“Drover” had already reported Smart. ‘I denounced the conduct of the police and now denounce the conduct of the Government that allows such wholesale murders to be committed by its officers”. [3]
1. “After [Native Police officer Alfred] Smart heard two prospectors had been killed by blacks on the Leichhardt [River] in August 1883, he took troopers north and shot several Kalkadoon camping peacefully on the Coolullah run. The prospectors turned up alive. - Marr, Killing For Country, p. 353.
2. The Leader (Melbourne) 30 August 1884, p. 3.
3. Ibid.
Acknowledgment: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp.356-357, 448.362