March 4.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A dossier of atrocities
“...witnessed most horrible cruelties committed on the natives.”
When...42-year-old David Carley arrived in Western Australia in May 1863 he had spent a good deal of his adult life in prison. He was twice sentenced for being a 'rogue and vagabond' in 1851 and 1852 and for an unspecified misdemeanour in 1852. He was sentenced to a six-year goal term in 1855 and for a further ten years in 1861...Apart from a few minor offences Carley passed through the penal system in Western Australia receiving his ticket of leave in 1865, conditional pardon in 1869 and full pardon three years later when he moved north to the small northern outposts of Roebourne and Cossack...
Carley was shocked by the treatment of the Aborigines and began to compile a dossier of atrocities which he had witnessed or heard about on good authority. In January 1884 he bundled up a parcel of documents and sent them to the Aborigines Protection Society in London including '58 Pieces relative to the Slavery Rapine and Murders at the Nor west Coast of Australia'.[1] Carter's carefully documented list of atrocities played a major part in the growing movement for reform and was similar in its impact to the compendium of brutal incidents published by the Queenslander in 1880.
[The Rev'd John] Gribble met Carley for the first time in Perth on 4 March 1886 having just come from a long meeting with Bishop Parrry who had pressed him to pursue a policy [that Gribble regarded sadly as] 'contrary to right in relation to the settlers and the natives'. The meeting with the old lag could not have been more different. Gribble noted in his diary that Carley had,
for years lived in the North west and witnessed most horrible cruelties committed on the natives. Some of the cases cited by him were blood curdling. I am almost driven to desperation when I contemplate doings in the Colony and the very worst feature of the subject is that no redress can be secured. Those in high places are so mixed up with those who are guilty of wrong doing that it seems to be impossible to get justice meted out. [2]
Carley to Aborigines Protection Society, 26 May 1884, ASP/6, Rhodes House, Oxford.
Gribble Dairy, op. cit., 4 March, 1886.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 162-163, 264 n.9, n.10
____
“...the cost of fighting a guerrilla war against insurmountable odds...”
The war all but destroyed the Tasmanian's [1] political and cultural networks. In 1829, for instance [ex-convict Jorgen] Jorgenson noted that the 'grand corroboree' held each November on the plains north-west of the Ouse River was cancelled 'for fear of being surprised'. [2] Many smaller ceremonies and dance were also probably cancelled on account of the noise and distraction they created, or because there was no one left to perform them... Despite the onslaught of tragedies that Tasmanians suffered during the Black War, their conduct was not merely a series of survival responses. In addition to their myriad defensive concerns, most also appear to have been committed to pressing offensive campaigns against the white invaders, which consumed vast swaths of their time and energy. Thus, although they endeavoured to stay safe, warm and fed, they were also driven by feelings of hatred and injustice. In the end though, the cost of fighting a guerrilla war against insurmountable odds was more than they could bear.
Clements uses the term 'Tasmanians' to refer to Tasmania's Indigenous population.
Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 816.
Acknowledgment: Nicholas Clements, The Black War, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2014, p. 124, 241 n.153.