March 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Concerned squatter vs Native Police officers
A squatter defending Aboriginals residing on his property.
The well-educated and well-connected squatter Charles Dutton conducted a longer and more systematic campaign against the Native Police. He wrote to the government in March 1861 in fury about the behaviour on his station of a Native Police detachment under the control of Lieutenant Patrick. Dutton was unusual at the time in that he encouraged the local Aborigines to live on the station. In what Dutton called an impertinent and dictatorial tone the Lieutenant ordered the Aboriginals camp to disperse and destroyed their possessions, telling Dutton that his orders were to disperse all 'armed mobs'. But the young squatter refused to accept that such behaviour had official sanction. Here, he wrote, was a small group of eight men and seventeen women and children who had camped near his head station awaiting the arrival of the bullock wagons carrying promised tomahawks and blankets and they were 'rushed out of their camp' and threatened with shooting if they dared to stand their ground, their implements of chase carried off and destroyed. 'Could anything be more repugnant, he asked, to 'every feeling of humanity...every principle of justice and good faith'. He observed that the Aborigines asked him why they were shot and paraphrased their complaints:
‘they say bail mine kill white fellow, but kill [animals], bail take rations what for shoot him?’
How are they to be answered, how appeased, he cried, and angrily replied:
'There is but one answer you are black and must be shot'. [1]
C. B. Dutton, to Colonial Secretary, 23 Mar(ch) 1861, Queensland Col(onial) Sec(retary) 61/2545.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Whispering In Our Hearts, pp.94-95, 259 n.4.
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A pen sketch of Native Police officers
[Second-Lieutenant Alfred March] Patrick, whose Native Police camp was near Bauhinia Station, attempted to drive the Aboriginal workers there from the property, despite remonstrations from [Charles] Dutton who had recently been appointed as a Magistrate. [Commandant Frederick] Walker claimed that Patrick was stopped only when Henry Dutton (Charles' brother) threatened the officer with a revolver. [1] Dutton wrote to Commandant Morisset...[and Morisset's] replacement, John Bligh, received it. Dutton quoted Patrick who angrily justified himself, 'by saying that other Police officers before they had been in the force a fortnight had sent dispatches (I use his own words) of lots of blacks shot and here he has been in the force six months before he has shot a single black...' [2]
...Both Dutton and Walker warned of serious trouble ahead. Four years later, and 520 kilometres to the north, at Bowen, the editor of the Port Denison Times noted that:
Many of the officers [in charge of the Native Police] are but young, hot-headed men, who from habit, and perhaps from nature, think no more of shooting a blackfellow than a pigeon. They hold a theory that an offence committed by one portion of a tribe should be wiped out by the wholesale slaughter of as many of the first party they can come across as the troopers can shoot down, and they see nothing wrong in the act. [3]
F Walker to Attorney-General, letter dated 10 July 1861, Nullalbin [sic] PO, Queensland State Archives (QSA), COL/A17 61/1469, p.3.
C B Dutton to Commandant Morisset, Bonhinia [sic] Downs, 23 March 1861, QSA COL 61/2545 with covering letter by J O'C Bligh cited in Wright, The Cry for the Dead, 1981, p.104.
Editorial, Port Denison Times, 23 September 1865.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp 49-50, 218 n.16, n.17, n.18.