May 4.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...hunted down like native dogs.'
Reasons for Indigenous resistance and the extent of blood-stained settler reprisals.
...Archibald Meston commented: 'Very singular is the silence of those old pioneers [of the Condamine region] – [Patrick] Leslie, Arthur Hodgson and Stuart Russell – with regard to the blacks. It looked suspiciously like a conspiracy of silence'. [1] Pemberston Hodgson, however, unashamedly summed up the policy of dispersal: 'The earliest, the primitive inroads of the settlers, were marked with blood, the forests were ruthlessly seized, and the native tenants hunted down like native dogs'. [2]
Their willing agents in this slaughter were the front-line troops – the convict and emancipist shepherds. James Demarr, a shepherd on Laidley Plains in 1843, described his colleagues as 'a not inconsiderable number of the vilest scoundrels and ruffians, who thought no more of shooting a stray blackfellow than they would a mad dog'. He continued: 'It was no unusual thing to hear these ruffians in conversation with one another, boasting of the blacks they had slaughtered, and when relating the particular qualities of a savage brute of a dog, say, he would pull down a blackfellow, or seize a blackfellow, and tear his entrails out'. He concluded, in a nasty echo of the Kilcoy massacre, that it was no secret that some station blacks had been given milk laced with arsenic. [3]
The white invaders were assisted in their conquest of the frontier by using 'tame' natives from areas already conquered...Thomas Hall believed that many of the natives sheltering in the white man's camp had failed the bora tests [of initiation] or had breached tribal law and were escaping from tribal disgrace or tribal justice. Such renegade natives often exacerbated distrust and conflict between black and white. This was vividly illustrated by the Darkey Flat Massacre in 1845. Throughout that year two uninitiated Aboriginal youths from southern New South Wales, in the employ of a local squatter, had raped several women of the McIntyre (Bigambul?) tribe. When the tribal warriors gathered to punish the transgressors, the reprobates informed the settlers at Talgai Station that the McIntrye tribe was planning a raid on the station. The whites promptly carried out a pre-emptive attack, killing several Aborigines: thereafter the McIntyre tribe had good cause for resisting the white invasion. [4]
A. Meston, 'Genesis of Toowoomba II: Advent of the White Man' in Toowoomba Chronicle, 9 April, 1920.
C. P. Hodgson, Reminiscences, p. 77.
James Demarr, Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago, London, 1893, p. 223.
T. Hall, 'A Short History of the Downs Blacks known as “The Blucher Tribe”', Warwick [n.d.] p. 10; T. Hall, Early History of Warwick, pp. 103-104.
Acknowledgment: Maurice French, Conflict on the Condamine – Aborigines and the European Invasion, Darling Downs Institute Press, Toowoomba, 1989, pp. 98, 99, 151 n. 27, n.28, n.29, n.32
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Large massacre of Indigenous people in Gin Gin district in Queensland
Inseparable from opposition to [Governor] Gipps was a growing insensitivity to the rights of Aborigines…the far northern squatters relied on large-scale punitive expeditions against Aborigines rather than regular minor skirmishes. Meting out “wholesome lessons to the natives” became an important para-military activity, reinforcing personal and ideological ties between the white conquerors. The death of Gregory Blaxland…at Gin Gin precipitated one such engagement. A large party of squatters headed by Port Curtis Commissioner of Crown Lands, Maurice O’Connell, sought out and shot down several hundreds of the Gin Gin tribe on Paddy’s Island near Fairymead. [1] Although the number of victims is difficult to ascertain exactly, the number of black casualties on this occasion may have numbered as many as 1,000. This contrasted with the figure of 28 whites who died in racial collisions on the Wide Bay – Burnett frontier prior to 1853. [2] The policy of the settlers in so far as it can be said exist was that of extermination. The collision at Myall Creek was a trifle by comparison with such wholesale slaughter.
Arthur Lawrie, “Early Gin Gin and the Blaxland Tragedy”, J.H.S.Q., V. 4, no. 5. Dec. 1952, pp. 712-713.
D. Dignan, The Story of Kolan, (Brisbane, Smith and Paterson, 1964), p. 110.
Acknowledgment: Denis Cryle, The Press in Colonial Queensland – A social and political history 1845-1875, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, pp. 12, 147 n.15, n.16.