May 18.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Revenging Reprisals
The cost in human lives of retributive raids
Evidence of the popular legitimacy of vengeance is plentiful. Survivor Tom Wills wrote to his family after Cullin-la-Ringo, saying he wanted ‘good resolute men that will shoot every black they see’. [1] His attitude was endorsed by Colonial Secretary Robert Herbert, who wrote to neighbouring squatters saying, ‘the thanks of the Government are due in the first instance to yourselves for so promptly coming forward to avenge the killed’. [2]...The killing….of nineteen members of the Wills party [occurred at Cullin-la-Ringo [station] near Springsure [in central Queensland], on 17 October 1861...Two early influential works on the Cullin-la-Ringo killings were Oscar De Satge, Pages from the Journal of a Queensland Squatter and J.T.S. Bird’s The Early History of Rockhampton. De Satge wrote ‘this terrible killing acted as a warning to many not to trust or admit the blacks’, Bird repeated this assessment by describing the event as ‘an especially atrocious outrage which showed everyone that the blacks were not to be trusted’. [3] This distrust has been passed down...despite contrary evidence including a report in the Sydney Morning Herald of 12 December 1861 saying the attack was caused by the abduction of two boys by three ‘New South Wales gentlemen who refused to release them, despite being followed by sixty men for a ‘considerable distance’.
Governor George Bowen reported to England that ‘an uncontrollable desire for vengeance took possession of every heart’ of the neighbouring squatters, and ‘about thirty of the tribe of murderers are said to have fallen in the deadly struggle which ensued when the eleven English avengers stormed their camp’. [4] This was just one episode. According to one recent publication, over seventy squatters rallied to ‘seek out those responsible’ and ‘local legends recount many graphic tales of encounters and dispersals’. [5] One contemporary account in the Rockhampton Bulletin, reprinted in the Sydney MorningHerald on 11 December 1861, said the police ‘overtook a tribe of natives, shot down sixty or seventy, and ceased firing when their ammunition was expended’.
Revenge parties existed in many parts of Queensland. According to one news item in the Queenslander of 7 July 1866, settlers assembled after a traveller was found murdered ‘700 miles from Rockhampton, and ‘set off to chastise the murderers, and succeeded to a sickening degree - having so thoroughly whipped some thirty of the depredators that they will never again ask to smell gunpowder’. ‘Smelling gunpowder’ is a reference to extermination by firearms, in other words, ‘they are dead now because they were close to the guns’. According to the Queenslander of 14 February 1874, travellers on the road from the Flinders River to the Norman township in the Gulf district believed ‘there were no blacks alive within a radius of twenty miles’ after retributive raids following the death of a settler.
T.W. Wills to H.C.A. Harrison (24 October 1861), National Library of Australia, Manuscript MS 1468.
Colonial Secretary to Messrs Gregson, McIntosh and others at Rainworth (11 November 1861), Colonial Secretary’s Letterbook, COL/R2, letter 893 of 1861.
Oscar De Satge, Pages from the Journal of a Queensland Squatter (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1901), 154; and J.T.S. Bird, The Early History of Rockhampton (Rockhampton, 1904) 106.
Governor Brown to Secretary of State for Colonies (16 December 1861), Governor’s Despatches, GOV/23, Despatch 74 of 1861.
Grahame Walsh, Carnarvon and Beyond (Tarakka Nowan Kas Publications, 1999), 87.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp. 22, 24-25, 66-67, 271 n.41, p. 275 n. 43, n.44, n.45, n.46.