July 14.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Rotting bodies and responses to massacres
Bodies unburied
Others besides the missionaries were raising concerns about the activities of the police in the Territory. Mr G Warland from the Roper River district had earlier [in 1886] written to the Commissioner of Police, complaining about the Northern Division of the Native Police Force that had been patrolling that district since 1884 under the administration of Inspector Paul Foelsche. Writing as 'a private gentleman', Warland lodged a protest about the fact that bodies of four Aboriginal men, shot by the Native Police during a patrol under the direction of Mounted Constable [Cornelius] Power, remained unburied, and he urged [Commissioner William] Peterswald to monitor the force's activities:
As head of the South Australian police I must think it my duty to give you an alarming note of what is as certain to happen here...that is great Trouble with the blacks and the whites unless great tact is observed and the greatest precaution taken, and that at once. [Don't] neglect the signs now observable to one as well used to all sorts, both black and white on the Back Country, as myself. You may ask what is there to fear. Late events of shooting and spearing in the district of which you are well informed. Also that the bodies are still unburied. The men on the establishment are asking me if men and dogs are equal in the light of govt. that no inquest or enquiries is or has been held. And that the bodies of men are to rot above ground like knocked up cattle. This terrible affair has a terribly demoralising effect on all classes here out of which trouble will come, especially to your police force...I am gauging events as they rise and...events cast their shadow. [1]
When Warland's letter was forwarded for comment to [Inspector] Foelsche, the Inspector returned it to the Minister of Education with an angry memo which noted: 'when up country in May last year, I heard a gentleman say - “If you tell people you believe what Warland tells you, people will not believe you”' An inquiry could not be held, he argued, because ‘a coroner's jury' could not have been obtained within a radius of two hundred miles'. [2] When Foelsche wrote his memo, the bodies had been buried.
Warland to Peterswald, 20 April 1886, SAPHS COP 001162, and SRSA GRG 5/2/1886/356.
Foelsche to Minister of Education, 14 July 1886, SAPHS 001162, and SRSA GRG 5/2/1886/356.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 41-42, 191 n.13, n.14.
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Differing responses to massacres
Late in the twentieth century, with a population
of eighteen million the shootings of
thirty-five settlers went down in Australian history
as the Port Arthur Massacre prompting
a Prime Minister who denied Black massacres
to buy back the nation’s firearms to minimise
the chance of another white one.
But wasn’t their blood red too?
And didn’t their loved ones cry?
What is the colour of massacre?
Acknowledgment: Jeanine Leane, “The Colour of Massacre” in Fire Front – First Nations Poetry and Power Today, Alison Whittaker ed., University of Queensland Press, 2020, p.18.