March 6.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘Trucking’ children
The taking of children
The warriors of the Darkinjung people, from the rugged ranges about the Hawkesbury, had a considerable tactical advantage in their terrain. Conflict at the Hawkesbury rapidly spiralled...it seems the poorly armed settlers felt they needed a tactical advantage of their own and began to take aboriginal children as hostages. The children were, perhaps euphemistically, described by [Captain David] Collins as having 'fallen into the settler[']s hands' and 'detained at their huts, notwithstanding the earnest entreaties of the parents for their return'.
In September [1794] settlers 'seized a native boy' who they claimed was a spy attempting to return to his people with an 'account of [the settlers'] weakness, there being only one musket to be found among several farms'. Collins said this was considered by many in Parramatta and Sydney to be 'a tale invented to cover the true circumstance, that a boy had been cruelly and wantonly murdered by them': they had dragged him through a fireplace 'until his back was dreadfully scorched', threw him in the river then 'shot and killed him'. Whether he was a spy or was tortured and killed in a frenzy of revenge, Collins was now convinced that 'the presence of some person with authority was becoming absolutely necessary among those settlers, who, finding themselves freed from bondage, instantly conceived they were above all restrictions.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp.108-109
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It is known that in past years a most obnoxious practice grew up of the police supplying their friends etc with aboriginal children... This 'trucking' in children is still going on. 'Settlers in outside districts' – I am quoting Protector Galbraith – 'who have plenty of myalls about their country are often importuned by town residents and others to bring them in a boy or a girl. In due time the child arrives. How the children are separated from their parents is a subject of conjecture and surmise. Most people will tell you that the child is better off with Europeans: in my opinion the contention is absurd. Most of the children will bolt (if old enough, and the distance is not too great) and then they are termed ungrateful by their owners. This practice has been going on for years, and, with the exception of one or two cases, personally known to me, without good results to the children: they change masters and mistresses, prostitution and disease follow, they can only speak pidgin English, and finally become pariahs amongst both whites and blacks. [1]
Report of the Northern Protector of Aborigines for 1902, QVP, II, 1903, p. 461.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession – Black Australians and White Invaders, p.143.
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Sovereignty and Treaty
In…Unfinished Business… the underlying substantive issue, the elephant in the room, is sovereignty, that same issue with which imperial Britain and colonial Australia contended in the early nineteenth century (and with which both continue to grapple, in Britain’s debate on the Lisbon Treaty, and Australia’s debate on border protection). In Australia, sovereignty and its meanings underpin both the Indigenous demands for a treaty, and successive federal governments’ refusal or inability to negotiate such.
Acknowledgment: Maria Fels’ review of Unfinished Business: The Australian Formal Reconciliation Process by Andrew Gunstone, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2009, in Aboriginal History Vol. 33 (2009-10) p. 247.