July 4.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Rifles arrived...atrocities committed
For thousands of years they shared cultural events but then men with rifles arrived.
Until 1848 four tribes inhabited the valley of the Tilly River: the Girramay in the southern part, the Djiru along the north, the Gulngay along the Tully River and the Jirrbal to the west. The four tribes have been linguistically represented as 'Dyirbal'. [1] For thousands of years they hunted for food, held buyas (corroborees) to settle disputes and shared cultural events. On 4 July 1848, a dramatic change took place. On what is now known as Meunga Creek, the Girramay confronted white invaders. Edmund Kennedy's exploring party had arrived. During the confrontation four Girramay were shot. A week later, on 11 July, Kennedy was near the Murray River when he wrote that ‘the fifteen or so Aborigines following them did not know what had happened to their mates eight miles in front of them’. [2] That is, they had been shot. The rifle had arrived.
R M W Dixon, The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland, Cambridge University Press, London, 1972
Kennedy’s retrieved notes from Escape River dated Tuesday, 11 July 1848, in Edgar Beale, Kennedy’s Workbook, Wollongong University College, Wollongong, 1970, p.101.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp.133-34, 233 n.2, n.3.
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The very “air of Queensland...reeks with atrocities”.
Another prominent colonial historian, George W. Rusden, was also prompted by The Way We Civilise disclosures to mount a searing indictment of Queensland's frontier relations in his three-volume History of Australia (1883). Rusden was an outspoken conservative and Anglophile, highly supportive of the British imperial enterprise. Yet the compounded evidence of Aborigines “left mangled and stark on the soil of Queensland” which the Queenslander's campaign disclosed, had invoked his outrage. The very “air of Queensland”, he charged, “reeks with atrocities committed and condoned”. The colonists there “had amply vindicated their claims to a vile existence”. Yet actions by perpetrators, Government functionaries and their supporters to suppress evidence of happenings, much talked about, yet less commonly recorded, threatened to “wither” this history of excesses “out of men's knowledge unexposed”. [1]
H. Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, (St Leonards, 1998), 132-34.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “Plenty Shoot 'Em'” - The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier” pp. 159-160, 170 n.40.
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The struggle against public opinion.
[The Rev'd John] Gribble was not left totally alone in the white community of Carnarvon. He was gratified, 'for the sake of Australian Christianity', that a few people had declined to sign the petition [calling for his withdrawal by the church for his support for local Aboriginal people]. Some who had, including George Baston and Thomas Bird, contacted the Bishop to have their names erased from the petition, feeling that they had been misled. Some tried to assist [Gribble] by purchasing extra supplies for themselves to provide some for Gribble, but they, too, were soon boycotted.
At another public meeting in Carnarvon on 28 December, Gribble was called upon to resign. Amidst heckling from the white crowd and cries of 'we are not slave-drivers', Gribble took the floor, declaring that he would never cease to fight 'for the downtrodden natives'. The West Australian reported the comments made at the meeting. Gribble had not proved himself to be 'a true Britisher', said Mr Rotton. Gribble had not acted Christianly, they said. 'If we were not Christians, Mr Gribble could not make us such'. A Mr Russell said that if Mr Gribble was a Christian, he certainly did not want to resemble him. [1]
West Australian, 5 January 1886.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 419-20, 454 n. 127.