July 16.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Indigenous Resistance
Resistance by the Indigenous owners of the land.
Considering the advantages possessed by the European the resistance was often surprisingly effective and unexpectedly prolonged. A high price was exacted from many pioneer communities in tension and insecurity as much as in property loss, injury or death. Aboriginal attacks on property had devastating effects on the fortunes of individual settlers, and at times appeared to threaten the economic viability of pioneer industries – squatting, farming, mining and pearling. There were occasions – as in Tasmania in the late 1820s, New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s and Queensland in the early 1860s – when Aboriginal resistance emerged as one of the major problems of colonial society...
Yet Europeans were only rarely willing to recognize the intelligence and courage which informed the resistance. When they did their comments were particularly interesting. In 1830 a writer in the Hobart paper The Colonial Times referred to 'a cunning superiority of tactics which would not disgrace some of the greatest military characters'. [1] Another island settler remarked that the blacks had 'oftentimes evinced superior tact and clearness of head'. [2] The official Tasmanian Aborigines Committee thought the blacks 'a subtle and daring enemy', a 'sagacious and wily race of people'. [3] A report of 1831 observed that the island blacks:
now conduct their attacks with a surprising organization, and with unexampled cunning, such indeed is their local information and quickness of perception, that all endeavours on the part of the whites to cope with them are unavailing. [4]
In 1834 Governor Stirling informed his superiors in England that West Australian settlers had found the blacks 'very formidable enemies, and if they could avail themselves of the advantages of combination it would be useless to attempt a settlement in this quarter with our present numbers'. [5] A pioneer colonist concurred, remarking in 1833 that if in addition to their knowledge of the country the local Aborigines had 'firearms and a little discipline' they would 'put an end to the settlement in less than a month'. [6] The Commandant at Port Essington wrote in 1834 that local blacks had shown 'extensive cunning, dexterity, arrangement, enterprise and courage' in their attacks on Europeans. [7] A generation later in north Queensland a writer to the Cooktown Herald remarked that the miners had difficulties enough to contend with:
without having to enter into guerilla warfare, and risk their lives fighting their sable foes, who are immeasurably their superiors in tactics and bush fighting. [8]
The Colonial Times 16 July 1830.
Ibid. 1 June 1831.
Report of Aborigines Committee, 27 August 1830, Papers of Aborigines Committee, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO/1/319, also CSO/1/323, p.77.
Report of Aborigines Committee, 20 October 1831; Papers Relative to the Aboriginal Tribes in British Possessions, BPP, 1834, p. 158.
Stirling to Aberdeen, 10 July 1835, Despatches to Colonial Office, 14 September 1834-6 December 1838, Letter 53, BL.
R.M. Lyon, 'A Glance at the Manners and Language of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of W Aus', Perth Gazette, 30 March 1833.
Geographical Memoirs of Melville Island, p. 153.
Cooktown Herald, 24 June 1874.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 90-91, 179 n.48, n.49, n.50, n.51, n.52, n.53, n.54, n.55.