July 3.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

“The Natives were hunted down and shot”

...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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My loyalty is to the Aborigines, not to white men who misuse them, or exploit them.

On one occasion while out on investigation, [Theodor] Strehlow was enjoying the hospitality one weekend of a station owner. While he was walking to the homestead from a shed with his host, he unknowingly dropped his diary. One of the Aboriginal housegirls (who could not read or write) found it the day after Strehlow had left and handed it to her empoyer.

He turned the leaves casually, but soon his anger began to rise as he digested some of the contents. He was personally mentioned, So were other station owners and managers well known to the man. Nothing written about them was complimentary. Strehlow had recorded everything they had said in his presence that he regarded as anti-Aboriginal, and it was obvious that many of the things he had mentioned had been said over the dinner table and should have been confidential. The station manager sent the diary to [Strehlow’s superior] Mr J. McCaffrey [based at Alice Springs] with a bluntly-worded complaint against Strehlow.

The next time Strehlow was in Alice Springs, McCaffrey called him to his office and challenged him on his comments. “How could you record such things about people who make you welcome at their table, Ted?” he asked, “Don’t you think you owe them loyalty? Some mutual trust?”

“My loyalty is to the Aborigines, not to white men who misuse them, or exploit them. That material might be valuable some day… When a man, irrespective of whether he gives me hospitality or not, boasts to me bout the way he keeps his “abos [sic] in line”, and makes no secret of the fact that he condones his station hands raping Aboriginal girls of eleven and twelve, I think some record of his conversation is a necessary thing”…

...Louise O’Donoghue, M.B.E., a full-blood Aboriginal woman who grew up as a virtual slave on a Central Australian station, told me when I interviewed her for my book, Goodbye Dreamtime, that she ran away from what was considered her home when she was twelve because she was sickened by the sexual molestation she was expected to accept from the youngest to the oldest station-hand. Her statements endorse Strehlow’s attitude fully.

Ward McNally, Aborigines, Artefacts and Anguish, Chi Rho Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, 1981, pp.70, 72.