May 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Men, women and children killed
The carnage of dawn camp-raids.
Around midnight, [Alexander] Laing [the chief district constable at Sorell in Tasmania] and a detachment of four soldiers of the 40th Regiment arrived at [Robert] Grimes's hut and just before daybreak they 'proceeded to the spot where [Kickerterpoller] and his party lay, and got upon them unperceived. They secured [Kickerterpoller] and his companions, consisting of four black men, four women, and one male child: who made no resistance.' The Colonial Times reported that the 'natives were then conducted to Sorell Gaol, where they now remain'. [1]
This incident and the way it was reported set the parameters for how the war was conducted and reported over the next two years. Every time a colonist was harassed or killed by the Aborigines, Kickerterpoller would usually be cited as the ringleader, and a magistrate would authorise a joint police and military search party, assisted by armed stock-keepers and sometimes by settlers, to set off in pursuit. [2] They would surround an Aboriginal camp at night and then at daybreak shoot at the men, women and children as they lay sleeping. Sometimes, as in the incident near Bank Hill farm, in which fourteen Aborigines were killed, the party would also capture some of them. But they would neglect to officially report the death toll. In these cases newspaper reports sometimes filled in the gaps left in the official reports. On other occasions, such as the reprisal that followed the killing of two shepherds at Mount Augustus near Campbell Town in April 1827, the incident would be reported in the press as a daylight ambush by a large group of Aboriginal men bristling with spears and stones forcing the small British reprisal party to shoot in self-defence, leaving 'some' Aboriginal men 'wounded' before the rest of them 'ran away', leaving behind a cache of spears and waddies and their dogs, as well as items belonging to the dead shepherds, all of which the British would carry back in triumph to the magistrate. [3] But later evidence showed that the Mount Augustus incident, at least, was a well-planned dawn attack on an undefended Aboriginal camp, in which up to forty Aboriginal men, women and children were killed. [4]
Colonial Times, 15 Dec. 1826.
See HTG, 5 May 1827.
See Colonial Times, 4 May 1827.
See Ryan, 'Massacre in Tasmania'.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 87-88, 369 n.2, n.3, n.4, n.5.
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A decade later elsewhere on the continent and the power of muskets...
Alexander Buchanan [kept a journal of his] overland expedition in the second half of 1839...He set out from Sydney in July 1839 and arrived in Adelaide in December of that year. His arrival went virtually unnoticed in the press, but his own journal suggests that it was far from an uneventful passage. On 1 October he recorded: ‘We gave the men the muskets and ammunition today as we may expect to fall in with the blacks’. On 15 November, when Buchanan’s party encountered an Aboriginal party at the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers, he recorded:
the men fired upon them and we from the opposite bank fired upon them also and killed the old chief, when they all took to the Murray and we kept firing as long as they were within shot. There were five or six killed and a good many wounded’. [1]
On November 22, ‘a black was seen in some reeds and the carter fired upon him and killed him. He had come with no other intention but to spear sheep, so his plant was fixed’. Buchanan’s journal records that he fired upon Aboriginal people on half a dozen occasions, killing at least eight and wounding ‘many others’.
A. Buchanan, ‘Diary of a journey overland from Sydney to Adelaide’, Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Proceedings, 15 (1922-23): p. 72.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 34, 192 n.63.