March 30.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
War and courage not commemorated...
…perhaps the most generous tribute [to the courage of Indigenous people] was paid by Edward Eyre who wrote:
It has been said, and is generally believed, that the natives are not courageous. There could not be a greater mistake...nor do I hold it to be any proof that they are cowards, because they dread or give way before Europeans and their firearms. So unequal a match is no criterion of bravery, and yet even thus, among natives, who were labouring under the feelings, naturally produced by seeing a race they were unacquainted with, and weapons that dealt death as if by magic. I have seen many instances of an open manly intrepidity of manner and bearing, and a proud unquailing glance of eye, which instinctively stamped upon my mind the conviction that the individuals before me were very brave men. [1]
E.J. Eyre: Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, London, 1845, Vol.2, 216-217. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 91-92, 179 n. 56
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The Sydney wars are nowhere officially commemorated.
The Sydney wars are nowhere officially commemorated. There are, however, several examples of public art and some place names, such as the new suburb Pemulwuy.* There is also a plaque honouring the fourteen dead at the Appin massacre** of 1816, erected in 2007, a plaque on Sydney's north shore briefly noting the capture and then death by smallpox of Arabanoo in 1789, and a memorial garden in a private hospital in North Richmond. But there are no statues, monuments or museum displays memorialising the only major warfare in Sydney's past. There are no grave markers to the dead, apart from the remaining headstone at Richmond, on the Hawkesbury River, that reminds us how a settler was 'killed by natives'...Recognition of the Sydney wars may remind us how much colonial violence occurred across the region that now forms the modern city of Sydney and how important the military – and the militarisation of the colony itself – was to the project of colonisation. If there came a time for a roll of honour to the dead and wounded of the Sydney wars... [it would recognize] the soldiers and warriors involved and [include] convicts, settlers, [Aboriginal and European] women and children who were conscripted or caught up in the fighting and violence. Further research may provide more details of the unnamed dead and wounded. [1]
Watkin Tench, Sydney First Four Years, p. 292; Dawes, book C, p.16. Gapps writes of “the British invasion of the Sydney region” - p. 273.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, pp. 273, 307 n.11.
*On Pemulwuy, see entries for 22 May, 18 and 26 July.
** On the Appin massacre, see entry for 16 April.
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Outright brutality
There were massacres in which camps were attacked by day. There was slaughter involving men and women being shot at dawn while they slept, or lined up and shot, or cornered in a cave and shot. [1] Men were shot in cold blood so their wives could be raped. [2] Women were abducted and held prisoner for years or shot for sport. Girls as young as seven were raped by men with syphilis. Pastoral settlement was enforced with what must have seemed to Aboriginal people like weapons of astonishing power. Most popular were the .57-calibre Snider rifle, designed for big-game hunting in Africa, and the more advanced, more powerful .45-calibre Martini-Henry. Both were used by the British army, yet almost every overlander, stockman and station manager had one or the other – and not for hunting kangaroos.
Northern Territory police were armed initially with Snider rifles, but by the time pastoral settlement in the Gulf Country began in 1881, these had been replaced by the Martini-Henry. The enormous bullets caused horrific injuries to those not killed outright. If fired into a crowd, a single bullet could pass through one person and kill or maim others. The Martini-Henry could kill at more than one kilometre. Both weapons could kill an elephant.
Why would a police force need military rifles that could kill elephants? The primary role of the police was not to maintain law and order but to make the Territory safe for whites and their cattle, regardless of the cost to Aboriginal welfare and life. They were an avenging force, acting as judge, jury and executioner. Successive governments issued the police with unlimited ammunition and the authority to use it; they also issued arms to civilian punitive parties.
For people being lined up and shot, or cornered in a cave and shot, see the story by ‘Pharaoh’ Lhawulhawu, in Kirton 1963–65 (no page numbers). A translation by Dr John Bradley is at Roberts 2005: 198. European sources give other examples, such as the massacre in a cave in the Limmen Bight district (Argus 24.11.1911).
Northern Standard 5.6.1934; McIver 1935: 192–199.
Acknowledgment: Tony Roberts “The Brutal Truth’, The Monthly, Nov. 2009, pp.9-10, n.34, n.35.