March 8.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

“...treaties were never entered into...”

“...deaths [of] “some thirty or thirty-five blacks – including men, women and children”

In December 1860, Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler had led an unprovoked attack on a sleeping camp [of Indigenous people] at Dugandan near Ipswich, killing two blacks and abducting at least one woman for the pleasure of the troopers.

A child in arms and three men were left dangerously wounded. The thirty-year-old son of a London merchant and a Sicilian noblewoman, Wheeler was cutting a swathe through Moreton Bay. From Dungadan he took his men to John Hardie’s Fassifern a few miles away. Rode into the scrub, shot three old men, smashed two of their skulls and trashed their camp. Spears were broken, tomahawks beaten flat and clothes strewn about.

After Wheeler’s rampage, the Fassifern blacks sheltered with the station’s overseer, with kind shepherds and the publican of the Bush inn. Inquests were held into both killings by a most unusual man. Henry Challinor of Ipswich was a doctor of profound Nonconformist faith and liberal views. He didn’t drink. He was not a tool of the squatters. His enemies dismissed him as wordy and tiresome, but he took the search for truth seriously. He questioned Aborigines and believed them when they told him they were fired on without warning. He wrote to the Attorney-General:

The information of witnesses severally taken upon oath...will not allow me to arrive at any other finding than that the said Aboriginals were wantonly and wilfully murdered on the twenty-fourth day of December last by Lieutenant Wheeler and the detachment of Native Police on that day under his command. [1]

When [Ratcliffe] Pring [Queensland’s Attorney-General] did nothing, Challinor published in the press his 6000-word brief of evidence and his succinct accusation of murder.

Next, in February 1861, Rudolph “Dosh” Morisset, the older brother of [Eric Morisset] the Commandant of the [Native Police] force, led a killing spree on Manumbar station at the foot of the Bunya Mountains, while clans from miles around had gathered once again to feast. The Maryborough Chronicle put the deaths at “some thirty or thirty-five blacks – including men, women and children”. [2]

1. The North Australian, 19 February, 1861, p. 4.

2. Maryborough Chronicle, 4 April, 1861, p. 4.

Acknowledgment: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp.240-241, 439.

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Treaties – were never entered into.

George Arthur, governor of Tasmania from 1824 to 1836, strongly impressed on the Colonial Office the need to negotiate treaties in future settlements in Australia. In a dispatch of 1832 he insisted that it was ‘a fatal error in the first settlement of Van Diemen’s Land that a treaty was not entered into with the natives, of which savages [sic] well comprehended the nature’. [1] Arthur’s contemporaries advocated similar policies. In 1836, Colonel F C Irwin, commandant of the small military force in the Swan River Colony, now Perth, observed that all future dealings with the Aboriginal peoples should be governed by treaties negotiated between the two parties as a ‘measure of healing and pacification’. [2]

1. Arthur to Colonial Office, 24 September 1832, Colonial Office: Tasmania Original Correspondence, CO 280/35, UK National Archives.

2. F C Irwin, The State and Position of Western Australia, Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London, 1835, p. 28.

Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 47, 251 n.36, n.38.

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Public Opinion

The Indigenous Australians were subjects of the crown, and killing them was murder even if rarely punished. And there was the rub! Because the colonial government rarely attempted to bring colonists to justice, the community consensus was that killing ‘blacks’ was justified in almost any circumstances and that there was no moral equivalent between shooting them and murdering a countryman...There was, from the earliest times, community solidarity to keep any knowledge of killing hidden from outsiders, to protect perpetrators and revile and even rough up informers. Many officials lamented the conspiracy of silence they confronted and the related impossibility of persuading juries to convict even in the face of compelling evidence.

Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 74-75.