July 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Dreadful deeds
Dreadful deeds...done in the Queen's name'
In a letter to the editor of the North Australian in July 1860 a correspondent using the pseudonym "a Squatter" denounced the marauding [Native Mounted Police Force] and the 'dreadful deeds now done in the Queen's name'. He believed that the need to cover up the systematic brutality meant that whole neighbourhoods became accessories 'after horrible facts'. The most cold-blooded murders were consequently hidden until he believed that the whole community was 'becoming awfully debased'. [1] Another correspondent 'Justice', wrote with similar concern about the spreading influence of community tolerance of punitive violence on the frontier. He sought to prevent 'that abominable feeling becoming a principle in the minds of the men of Queensland, that to kill a blackfellow in cold blood is not murder'. [2]
North Australian, 10 July 1860.
'The Raid on the Aborigines', Moreton Bay Free Press, 15 Sep. 1859.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 92, 259 n.1, n.2. See the extract quoted for 22 February that follows this excerpt.
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The Europeans used to starve numbers of the old men, women and children to death
The long running debate endemic in pioneer communities between those who wanted to 'let the blacks in' and others equally determined to 'keep them out' was undoubtedly reflected on the other side of the frontier. 'Staying out' or 'going in' to white society was a major question for Aboriginal clans all over the continent. Either choice presented hazards. The unpredictability of European behaviour made any approach to station, farm, mining camp or township a dangerous and uncertain exercise. Yet life in the bush became increasingly hazardous and eventually 'staying out' became the greater of two evils. Dwindling indigenous food supplies put enormous pressure on clans seeking to live in isolation from the Europeans. Malnutrition stalked many camps and children and old people may have often died of hunger in the bush. A western Queensland pioneer was told by local blacks after they had come in that during the era of frontier conflict the Europeans:
used to starve numbers of the old men, women and children to death; for being hunted into the desert, they had neither the means of carrying water nor of catching game...and of course the weaker members of the tribe felt it most. [1]
Many clans were faced with a simple stark choice. They could take European animals and supplies and meet their immediate and pressing needs with the certainty of ensuing retaliation or they could move in to the fringes of the nearest European settlement to escape the tightening vice of hunger and violence.
Evidence of destitution can be adduced from parts of the country. The officials of the Port Phillip Protectorate wrote of the plight of Victorian blacks within a few years of the European invasion. After a journey through the western district in 1841 G.A. Robinson reported that the condition of the blacks was deplorable, their poverty the 'extreme of wretchedness'. [2] The missionary Francis Tuckfield was told by Aboriginal informants that there was scarcely anything left to eat in the bush, while E.S. Parker observed that the earliest settlers acknowledged that:
the Natives are now in a much worse condition and present a far less robust appearance that when they arrived – and that it is their decided conviction, that they must occasionally suffer great privations, from their altered and often emaciated appearance. [3]
Queenslander, 10 July 1880.
Robinson to l Trobe, 15 August 1841, Port Phillip Protectorate, in Letters, VPRO'.
F. Tuckfield, Journal, pp.95-96; Report to Assistant Protector , E.S. Parker to G.A. Robinson, 20 June 1839, Port Phillip Papers, 1840, Part 1.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 92, 179 n. 57, n.58, n. 59.