July 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Terror, stolen territory and police killings.
“Strike the Survivors with the greater terror”
Later governors of New South Wales and the other Australian colonies found it necessary to mount punitive expeditions of one sort or another. In 1816 Lachlan Macquarie was faced with serious Aboriginal resistance on the fringes of settlement to the south-west of Sydney. The need to protect the settlers overrode his humanitarian impulse to bring the Aborigines within the embrace of Christianity and civilisation. In April he dispatched three detachments of soldiers to march into the interior to drive any hostile Aborigines 'across the mountains'. Macquarie told his officers that on any occasion they saw or 'fell in' with the natives they were to call on them 'to surrender themselves to you as Prisoners of War'. [1] If they refused to or made 'the least show of resistance' they were to be fired upon. Those killed in the operation were to be hung in trees, so as to 'Strike the Survivors with the greater terror' against committing similar acts of violence in the future. The deaths of women and children and men who had not been involved in attacks on settlers would be unfortunate but unavoidable. Reporting on the expeditions Macquarie wrote:
And although...some few innocent Men, Women and Children may have fallen in these Conflicts, yet it is earnestly to be hoped that this unavoidable Result, and the severity which has attended it, will eventually strike Terror among the surviving tribes and deter them from the further Commission of such sanguinary Outrages and Barbarities. [2]
J Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788-1838, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, p. 51.
Cited in G Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009, p. 512
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 58-59, 259 n.6, n.7.
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“Wholesale robbery of territory”
“The system of colonization that has been pursued by the British government has been upon principles that cannot be too strongly reprobated... Aborigines have had wholesale robbery of territory committed upon them by the government and the settlers have become receivers of this stolen property.
Acknowledgment: James Blackhouse, report to [House of Commons] Select Committee on Aborigines, 1837, cited in The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Quotations, p. 3.
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The toll of violence of possession and dispossession.
In 1885, Frank Hann claimed he was informed by Sub-Inspector Lamond that the Native Police 'have shot...round this run alone over 100 blacks in three years and yet they still kill cattle. [1] which the dispersing was supposed to stop. It didn't, suggesting that it was a continued attempt to get rid of the whites, which the Aborigines possibly thought they had achieved during the previous period of station abandonment.
Unconfirmed quotation in D Trigger & J Devitt, A Brief History of Aboriginal Associations with the Lawn Hill Area, Doomadgee Aboriginal Community Council, 1992, p.3 (letter from F Hann to A Howitt, 5 July 1885). Richards makes the salient point that: 'We will never know if Lamond was exaggerating or if Hann quoted him accurately, but clearly a large number of deaths occurred.' J Richards, 'Patrolling Another Northwest Frontier', Law and History Conference, Hamilton, New Zealand, July 2001, pp.6-7.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp.161-62, 241. n. 29