July 21.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Civilisation and Dispossession.
Violence fostered by media encouragement.
At the end of 1846, the [Moreton Bay] Courier announced to its growing band of readers that newly discovered* country along the Boyne River and its tributaries were rapidly being stocked with 10,000 sheep and that a further influx from the Clarence and Northern Rivers was expected. [Arthur Sydney] Lyon, who owned and edited the Courier in its earlier years acknowledged:
We have often dwelt with interest and delight on the recorded toils and triumphs of early colonisation – the struggles and sufferings of those adventurous spirits who, in seeking to extend the blessings of civilisation, have enlarged the limits of British dominion and heightened the lustre of the English name. [1]
Such an aggressive imperialist statement was typical of Australian pioneering journals and journalists. The government decision, a few months later, to establish a colony at Port Curtis marked out the northern-most limit of the new rush into...south-east Queensland. In a lyrical outburst of colonising zeal, the Courier prematurely hailed the expedition as:
The first footmark of Civilisation on the hitherto trackless wilds – the first symptom of the victory which Sciences and the arts were about to achieve over barbarous ignorance – the first faint rays from the beacon flame of knowledge meeting and dispelling the darkness of lower superstition. The home of the savage had become the home of civilised man... [2]
For the local Aboriginal population the implications of Lyon's remarks were ominous. Editorial idealism provided the rationale for their dispossession. The Moreton Bay Courier's preoccupation with exploration and communication was inseparable from its verbal attacks on the Indigenous tribes of the Brisbane and Pine Rivers. Typical in this respect was its editorial page of 21 July 1846, which featured a eulogy of Leichhardt alongside a diatribe against Aboriginal aggression. Reports of violence were frequent and usually concluded with a vigorous call for reprisals. Through the medium of the newspaper, subscriptions could be raised and sizeable rewards offered for those who apprehended Aboriginal offenders. A siege mentality fostered by the Courier heightened disquiet among the townspeople. The murder of squatter Andrew Gregor and his female servant, near Caboolture, in November of the same year, was the signal for a general assault on the offending tribes, sanctioned by the Courier's disregard for more constitutional procedures:
We know enough of the Aborigines to be aware that, as is customary among all savages, all projects of love or war or expeditions of an unusual nature are first debated by the whole adult males of the tribe. Consequently according to our law to every outrage committed upon the whites they are all accessories ** – a class of criminals whose punishment is often well nigh equal to that of their principal crime. [3]
Pandering to anti-Aboriginal feeling and condoning collective acts of white violence were as much a part of the editorial mission as raising subscriptions for the local Hospital and School of Arts. By proclaiming itself the scourge of the [Indigenous] population, the press sought to encourage an embryonic sense of community, albeit with tragic results.
Moreton Bay Courier, 3 April 1847, p.2
Moreton Bay Courier, 3 April 1847, p.2
Moreton Bay Courier, 21 July 1846, p.2.
Acknowledgment: Denis Cryle, The Press in Colonial Queensland – A social and political history 1845-1875, pp. 7-8, 147 n.2, n.3, n.4.
Excerpt printed with permission of Denis Cryle.
* That is, 'discovered' by the white intruders into land owned for thousands of years by that land's Indigenous people. - RB.
** Here in print was a Dispossession rationale for vigilante massacres.- RB.