June 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Instances of conflict
Armed white stockmen confronted the Pallitorre people
[In Tasmania] the North nation, whose country [George] Robinson was about to enter, was locked in a desperate war with two of the most ruthless colonising groups in the colony – the Van Diemen's Land Company in the west and the cattle barons in the east – for control of their country. The company's grazing establishments at Emu Bay, the Surrey Hills, Hampshire Hills and Middlesex Plains were key theatres of violent conflict with the North nation, as were the vast cattle grazing runs in the Western Marshes near the Meander River. The North nation's four known clans – the Plairhekehillerplue from Emu Bay, the Punnilerpanner from Port Sorrell, the Noeteeler from the Hampshire Hills, and the Pallittorre from Quamby Bluff – were the guardians of the ochre mines at Mount Housetop, St Valentine's Peak, Mount Vandyke and the Gog Ranges and were well prepared to defend their country from the invaders. When violent conflict broke out on the cattle runs between the Pallittorre and the stockmen in December 1825, it was the beginning of some of the bloodiest encounters in the Black War. [1]
In that month the Pallittorre had returned to their country from the north coast, expecting to hunt kangaroo in the Western Marshes. To their surprise they found vast numbers of cattle occupying their kangaroo hunting grounds and heavily armed and experienced stockmen like Thomas Baker and James Cubit mounted on horseback shooting their kangaroos. Baker and Cubit carried shotguns, and Thomson Johnson wore a brace of pistols and carried a musket and a bayonet...The stockmen on this frontier saw themselves as frontline troops, ready to defend themselves and their masters' cattle and with the capacity to kill numbers of Pallittorre people. [2]
Breen, Contested Places, 23-31.
Ryan, 'Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania', 489-90.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 170-171, 374 n.17, n.18.
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‘...seventeen out of this lot never killed or troubled anyone else'.
[Over a half century later in Central Australia] in June 1885, [Mounted Constable Erwin] Wurmbrand reported that while on patrol in April-May, a clash had occurred that resulted in the death of one Aboriginal man among a party of over 20. The Hermannsburg missionaries, however, heard from another member of the patrol party, a Glen Helen station stockman, that 17 Aboriginal people had been killed. Asked for an explanation by his superiors, Wurmbrand reiterated his original report, and there the matter rested. [1] William Benstead, one-time manager of Glen Helen station, had accompanied Wurmbrand on this patrol and wrote about it years later in his memoir. Warrants were held for the arrest of those they were tracking, he wrote, 'so on this occasion we ran no risks as far as our necks were concerned, but all the same, caution was used, and whatever happened, it was usually reported as having successfully dispersed the natives; it read better. 'What happened that day, he continues, 'it is a thing of the past, and of little use writing up now; but I am sure that seventeen out of this lot never killed or troubled anyone else'. [2] Benstead's account not only is in keeping with the missionaries' account, but captures a grass-roots understanding of the nature and purpose of punitive violence. Of the consequence of this raid, Benstead wrote: 'It was a lesson they never forgot. It instilled fear into their tribe for 200 miles around, and was the means of putting an end to their murderous attempts'. [3]
Richard Kimber, 'Genocide or Not? The Situation in Central Australia 1860-1895' in Colin Tatz (ed.), Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Sydney, 1997, p. 55. The episodes described by Kimber are in Wurmbrand's report to Besley, 5 June 1885, SRSA GRG 52/1/1885/150.
William Benstead, Short Stories of my Life and Travels (typescript), private collection, n.d. p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 11-12.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 34-35, 190 n.58, n.59, n.60.