July 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“The Way We Civilise”
...the natives [were] hunted down and shot...
...later accounts by early settlers recalling the warfare suggest that not all casualties and events were reported, particularly during Magistrate William Cox's September 1816 campaigns. Surveyor William Govett arrived in the colony in 1828 and Presbyterian minister Reverend John Dunmore Lang in 1823. Both mentioned hearing 'dark, dismal' stories of 'dreadful excesses' that had previously occurred in the Sydney region. Lang said he was shown 'places on the Hawkesbury where the “commando” system [mobile, hand-picked troops] had been carried on, and the natives hunted down and shot'. The minister and missionary Lancelot Threlkeld, who arrived in the colony in 1824, told in 1838 how he had been astonished to hear a man 'boasting how many blacks he had killed upon his land'. Threlkeld may have heard the settler's boast at Thomas Arndell's Cattai estate, near Windsor (he married Arndell's daughter). He also recalled an horrific story of the shooting and hanging of an Aboriginal man.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, p.259.
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“The Way We Civilise”
In a series of well-researched, sensational disclosures in the Queenslander in mid-1880, entitled “The Way We Civilise”, editor Gresley Lukin and an anonymous journalist – since identified as Carl Freiberg – concurred that settler behaviour in Queensland “fell far below British standards”. Of all the colonies, its editorials contended, “we alone have descended to the 'kitchen lay' of extermination...a process which would shame us before our fellow countrymen in every part of the British Empire”. In response to fourteen editorials written in this vein, a wide range of squatters and other old pioneers wrote long, detailed accounts of witnessed or reported atrocities, virtually all agreeing, either with profound regret or brazen acceptance, that a “war of extermination” was going on. [1] Much more might have been disclosed, Freiberg contended, were it not for a prevailing climate of suppression surrounding the issue. “We have at our disposal a mass of information we cannot use”, he alleged: “This...comes from men so situated that, if it could be traced to them, they would be exposed to much annoyance, and in some cases the danger of total ruin”. [2]
The dissemination of this forum in pamphlet form [titled The Way We Civilise] throughout the colonies and Great Britain led Sir Arthur Gordon, then Governor of New Zealand, to impress on Prime Minister Gladstone in April 1883 Queensland's “special unfitness” for colonial governance, and thus helped thwart the colony's imperial ambitions in Papua New Guinea. Gordon referred to an amplified:
tone of brutality and cruelty in dealing with “blacks' [in Queensland] which is very difficult for anyone who does not know it, as I do, to realise. I have heard men of culture and refinement...talk not only of wholesale butchery...but of the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day's sport, or of having to kill some troublesome animal. [3]
Anon., The Way We Civilise: Black and White; The Native Police (Brisbane, 1880).
Queenslander, 3 July 1880.
R. Evans et al., Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (Brisbane, 1993) 78; Reynolds, Indelible Stain, 125, 130. [See also Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, pp.128-131]
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “'Plenty Shoot 'Em'” - The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier”, pp. 159, 170 n.37, n.38, n.39.