July 9.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“A catalogue of horrors”
“...in one day there was quite sixty natives, men women and children shot dead.”
...[David] Carley was shocked by the treatment of the Aborigines and began to compile a dossier of atrocities which he had witnessed or heard about on good authority. In January 1884 he bundled up a parcel of documents and sent them to the Aborigines Protection Society in London including '58 Pieces relative to the Slavery Rapine and murders at the Nor West Coast of Australia'. [1] Carley's carefully documented list of atrocities played a major role in the growing movement for reform and was similar in its impact to the compendium of brutal incidents published by the Queenslander in 1880...
[Ernest] Gribble himself wrote to the Protection Society, moved by the impact of Carley's passionate testimony. [2] He used Carley's evidence extensively in his own pamphlet Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land and in his numerous articles and speeches. They added greatly to the things he had seen and heard himself during his short sojourn in Carnarvon and helped explain the sense of outrage which motivated both Gribble and Carley in their confrontations with the rich and powerful in the colony. [3] Carley was quoted extensively in Gribble's infamous 1886 articles in Melbourne's Daily Telegraph. [4] As a resident of the north-west for eleven years he had in his possession, the missionary explained, tangible evidence of 'murders and cruelties and rapine of the grossest description' which included the following extensive 'catalogue of horrors':
It is very well known by all who knock about Nickol Bay and the 'Flying Foam passage', that in one day there was quite sixty natives, men women and children shot dead. The natives themselves have shown him one of the skulls of fifteen who were shot. Three of the skulls were those of children, and two of the small skulls had bullet holes through them. I have seen many natives shot in the back for no other reason than that of running away from their cruel slavemasters. I saw at 'Flying Foam' passage no less than twenty-four natives handcuffed together, and then conveyed to Delambre Island, and there detained until they were required for pearl diving, their only food being a little flour. [5]
Carley to APS, 26 May 1884. ASP/6.98, Rhodes House, Oxford.
Gribble Diary, 6 Mar. 1886.
Gribble met Carley for the first time in Perth on 4 March 1886 having just come from a meeting with [Anglican] Bishop Parry who had pressed him to pursue a policy 'contrary to right in relation to the settlers and the natives’ – Reynolds, Whispering, p.163.
9 July, 1886.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp.163, 164, 264 n. 9, 11, 12, 13.
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“...they might be shot...”
One of [Frederick] Albrecht's major material and spiritual contributions was his outreach policy which took him on exhausting camel treks to distant places and resulted in the establishment of outposts where Aboriginal evangelists ministered to their own people (p.227). That Aboriginal pastors continued their ministry after his departure is testimony to his work. These men provided Barbara Henson with some of her most interesting oral evidence. Listen to Pastor Ungkwanaka as late as 1986 (p. 107): people 'still think today they might be shot because station owners might get greedy of the country'. In old age Albrecht recalled only one occasion in Centralia 'where the Aborigines have been preferred before the bullocks' (p.268).
Acknowledgment: Review by John Mulvaney of ‘A Straight-Out Man: F.W. Albrecht and Central Australian Aborigines’ by Barbara Henson. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1992, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 17 (1993) p.153.