July 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The Whiteside Massacre
The actual poisoning took place, from all appearances, some time in late January or early February 1847. Yet the story only emerged gradually onwards from 6 March when ‘James Brown, a hired servant of Capt. Griffin’s appeared before the Bench to prefer a charge of assault against John Day, a fellow-servant’. No more than this was revealed by the Moreton Bay Courier on that date. Left out was the fact that the allegation of the poisoning was a central part of the evidence given by Brown. [1]
Being in this period the archetypical Australian frontier journal, the Courier reported only the injuries and the occasional ‘murder’ inflicted on the white settlers by the blacks, whereas the possible injuries, cruelties and killing by whites remained unreported, or rather, they were only reported on if this was not be avoided.
...Returning, however, to the skirmish between the Whiteside employees mentioned briefly in the Courier on 6 March 1847. The Australian in Sydney unexpectedly followed up on this, revealing what James Brown had told the Police Magistrate in Brisbane about the poisoning case. The evidence given at that occasion, was that before
...Captain Griffin’s men left the station at the lambing season, they mixed together a quantity of arsenic and flour, and then left it in the hut, expecting the blacks would visit the hut and make use of the mixture. [2]
The reason behind this was an attempt on the life of a hut-keeper on Whiteside performed in execution style on 18 November 1846 by a black who had been concealed ‘behind one of the trees near the hut’ attempting to kill the hut-keeper ‘with a waddie’. The victim was severely injured, allegedly left blind from then on. [3] The arsenic laced flour was done so as to avenge this incident. Brown had not been directly involved, he claimed, but a fellow named Brady, who was also in town at the time, he said ‘knew more about the case’. Initially Brady denied all knowledge, but
...confirmed Brown’s statement, naming two other servants who were also aware of the fact – namely, the hutkeeper who had been wounded, and another named Coppin, the latter of whom he said had mixed the arsenic with the flour.
When called upon to testify, the two servants, named Gamble and Coppin, naturally aware that they potentially faced execution for mass-murder, denied all direct involvement in this case. Instead they stated, somewhat similarly to John Griffin...’that the blacks themselves had mixed it in a dish in which there were some remains of arsenic that had been used in a preparation for the sheep’. The people behind the article in the Australian however, rejected this, saying that, leaving…
...flour on the floor, and arsenic in the identical vessel in which flour is always thrown before it can be made into dampers, was only another way of ‘doing the trick’. [4]
...Ultimately both the Kilcoy and the Whiteside poisoning cases were mentioned during testimonies to the parliamentary Select Committee into the Native Police Force in 1861. The key witness was the highly respected 64 year old Shipping Merchant, Richard James Coley (1797-1864) classified...as ‘an old resident of great experience’...On being asked...whether he knew if any of the allegations made in the Kilcoy and the Whiteside poisonings had ‘been proved in any way’, Coley stated that they ‘have been proved, as far as the accounts have been given to me, by the men who were the principal actors themselves’...Subsequently questioned...whether figures as high as ‘seventy’ might be exaggerated, Coley significantly replied ‘Not to much extent’.
… During the parliamentary debate that followed this inquiry, the member for Ipswich, Storekeeper and Publican, Patrick O’Sullivan (1818-1904) is on record somewhat rhetorically stating that he quite ‘believed that Mr Griffin actually boasted to Captain Coley that he had poisoned about seventy blacks’. [5] Moreover, during the same debate, John Watts (1821-1902), of Eton Vale on the Darling Downs and otherwise known as a passionate defender of the Native Police system, added to this, saying that he personally had no doubt that ‘hundreds’ of Aborigines ‘had been murdered in cold blood by giving them arsenic and strychnine in their food’. [6]
Moreton Bay Courier [MBC] 6 March 1847 p. 3b
Australian 13 April 1847, p. 3d
MBC 21 Nov 1846, p. 2d, Outrage at Griffin’s Whiteside Station.
Australian 13 April 1847, p. 3d
Queensland Parliamentary Debates as by Brisbane Courier [BC] 27 July 1861, p. 5a-b, Patrick O’Sullivan.
QBD as by 25 July 1861 p. 3b-c, John Watts.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', pp. 84-88 and n.159, n.161, n.162, n.163, n.168, n.169.