July 29.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Dispossessed of land and food.
In our Wide Bay and Burnett district blackfellows were shot down at sight by some of the settlers, and many scores of men and women were poisoned by strychnine being placed in the flour that was distributed to them, or that had been left in places handy for the blacks to themselves take possession of. [1]
Between 1848 and 1849, the Colonial Office in London ordered that pastoral leases should allow for dual usage of territory: that Aboriginal occupancy must be a legal requirement of the lease. [2] By driving Aboriginals out pastoralists were actually acting contrary to the legal requirements of their lease. This was just another illegality that accompanied the takeover of Aboriginal lands and enormously increased the possibility and actuality of violence. There is some evidence that [Commandant] Frederick Walker was outraged that pastoralists were flouting the law in this way and using the Native Police to enforce the wrongful usage of their leaseholds. It is one of the reasons he was dismissed and became such an outspoken critic of the Native Police system.
Daily News and Mail, 29 July 1933 in Father Leo Haye's book of press cuttings, No.36, p.40, Fryer Library Collection, University of Queensland Library.
H. Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told? Viking, Ringwood, 1999, pp.210-11.
Personal communication with Raymond Evans, email 28 March 2011.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp.31, 214 n.2, n.3, n.4.
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Once they had been displaced from their traditional lands by squatter and settlers, Aboriginal people moved to other areas where settler culture often denied their status as Indigenous people. From the moment the settlers invaded Aboriginal lands from the 1830s until the present day, non-Aboriginal Australians have employed a familiar strategy to deny Aboriginal people their right to land. They have argued that those with the only legitimate claim to land are descendants of 'traditional' Aboriginal societies. This strategy is unjust because of the way in which Aboriginal people were removed from their lands, and because it ignores the various ways in which they have belonged to 'country' – through mother, father, conception, birth, death, burial, totemic connection, succession and conquest. [1] Aboriginal people in Eden-Monaro in the mid nineteenth century lost their land to the squatters, and many lost their indigeneity as well, at least in the eyes of settler culture.
Sue Wesson, An Historical Atlas of the Aborigines of Eastern Victoria and Far South Eastern New South Wales, Monash Publications in Geography and Environmental Science, No. 53, Monash University, 2000, p.9.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, “This Wonderful Invasion” in Looking for Blackfellas' Point – An Australian History of Place, pp. 67, 240 n.13.
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The rivers were central to Aboriginal economies and lifestyles. Journals of various European travellers record how, in the rich habitats of the Normanby-North Kennedy river systems, Aborigines caught fish (using traps, 'poison' plants, weirs, nets, spears and hollow logs), gathered foods (such as waterlily roots, shellfish and eggs), hunted animals, constructed huts, burned the grass, followed pathways, made camp fires, cooked in stone ovens and stored their fishing nets, spears, dillybags, clubs and axes. [1] The high density of Aboriginal settlement is evident in Mulligan's description of 'a regular township' of 'about one hundred gunyahs or more' near the Kennedy River. [2] Another example is a 'fishing station' on the Normanby River near Battle Camp: 'The blacks must have had a good many large barramundi judging by the heaps of scales lying about. Six dome-shaped gunyahs, 4 feet high and 6 in diameter, were still standing.'[3]
See records of Hann 1873; Mulligan 1873 quoted in Pike 1998: 37-40; Jack 1922 vol II: 474-518; Corfield 1923; Roth 1901: s.15.
Mulligan quoted in Pike 1998: 39.
Jack 1922 vol II: 488.
Acknowledgment: Noelene Cole, “Battle Camp to Boralga: a local study of colonial war on Cape York Peninsula, 1873-1894”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 28 (2004) p. 159 n.33, n.34, n.35.