March 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“...they have possessed from time immemorial.”
‘White Mateship’, Conspiracy of Silence and Northern Etiquette
The code of silence that precluded police from prosecuting crimes against perpetrators was widespread across the Kimberley. Gordon Broughton, a young Sydney man who tried his luck as a stockman in the Kimberley, described the bond between male European colonists, the ‘mateship’ as a form of ‘bush masonry’. As some of the few white men in avast expanse of country, the ‘ties that bound them’ became very strong. [1] ...explorer Aeneas Gunn [observed] that: ‘it is considered a breach of northern etiquette to ask a man whether or not he shot a blackfellow or not’. [2] This is revealing, both in the sense that it was deemed acceptable, but also that it was considered bad manners to talk about it...
...‘Troublesome’ Aboriginal people, such as those who escaped from gaol many times, were sometimes killed in clandestine ways. By the early twentieth century, police (and colonists) in general knew of the ramifications of illegal killing and went to greater lengths to hide bodies, often by burning the remains. Burning Aboriginal bodies to hide evidence appeared to escalate in the 1900s as more public attention was given to the Kimberley.[3] The practice continued into the 1920s and 1930s at least and was aided and abetted by the pervasive conspiracy of silence that, nearly twenty years after the establishment of the Kimberley force, remained stronger than any belief in the rule of law...
Many of the ‘silences’ around issues to do with Aboriginal people that underpin many colonial accounts have been revealed. We have seen how this colonial expansion that established commercial dynasties came at enormous cost to Aboriginal people...We have seen how colonists and governments refuted allegations of mistreatment of Aboriginal people: by denial...That [the isolationof the region] was an important factor in Kimberley policing almost goes without saying. It enabled local police to police without central oversight. It enabled pastoralists to engage in violence against Aboriginal people with relative impunity. It made it extremely difficult to investigate claims of mistreatment and encouraged collusion amongst colonists: the ‘freemasonry of silence’ made information gathering practically impossible…
1. G. Broughton, Turn Again Home, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1965, p.35
2. T. Willind and K. Kenneally (eds), Under a Regent Moon: a historical account of pioneer pastoralists Joseph Bradshaw and Aeneas Gunn at Marigui Settlement, Department of Conservation and Land Management, Perth, 2002, p.47.
3. An account of this practice is referred to here: ‘White Savages, Rapes and Murders, Police Intimidated’, Sunday Times, 20 April 1902, p.4.
Acknowledgment: Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’ – Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2016, pp. 146-147, 391, 426, 509 n.145, n.151, p. 582 n.105
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“They are excluded from the soil...and that exclusion works their death.”
As a nation we have placed ourselves in a position that has compelled the Aborigines to become our neighbours and we have worked ill towards our neighbours, because we, the many, dispossess the few Blacks of their right of birth, which convey to them a certain district in which they seek and obtain their means of subsistence. Our might deprives them of this right, without remuneration; and immigration, so beneficial to us as a Colony, in increasing our population, decreases in an incalculable ration, our neighbours as a people, by taking away the common hereditary privileges which they have possessed from time immemorial. The place of their birth is sold to the highest bidder. They are excluded from the soil, being found generally prejudicial to the pecuniary interests of the purchaser, and that exclusion works their death. [1]
L. Threlkeld, Annual Report for 1838, p. 4, Threlkeld Papers, ML.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, p. 77.