May 14.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
In the wake of ‘explorers’
An explorer’s journey in his perceptions...
In December 1843, Ludwig Leichhardt, John Archer, a Mr Waterstone and three “blackfellows”, who carried provisions, trekked across the Conondales and joined the Aborigines gathered at Baroon to feast on the Bunya nuts...
At Moreton Bay the friendliness of the Aborigines and their useful knowledge of the environment causes Leichhardt to include the Aborigines in his ideas of untouched Nature. European culture is now constructed as a destructive influence rather than something which could benefit the Aborigines:
The blackfellow, in his natural state, and not yet contaminated by the white man, is hospitable and not at all devoid of kind feelings. [1]
Leichhardt develops an empathy with the Aborigines and his earlier ideas advocating slavery and the removal of children from clans disappear. In a letter to his brother-in-law on 14 May 1844, after returning to Newcastle, Leichhardt says he experienced a sadness while being with vigorous tribes because he knew they would eventually be struck down by European bullets and disease. But he represents this as a natural, inevitable process with ideas that anticipate Darwin:
If it is not possible to civilize these black children of Nature, or even to reconcile them to civilization, I am far too firm a believer in the race to which I belong ever to prefer a swarm of wayward, aimless blacks to populous, orderly white country. In the predominance of the Caucasians we must acknowledge the same law of nature which ordains that the hind shall follow the strongest hart. [2]
M. Aurousseau (ed.), The Letters of F.W. Ludwig Leichhardt, Cambridge, Cambridge University for the Hakluyt Society, 1968, p.675.
Aurousseau, Letters, p. 757.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Jones, Four Bunya Seasons in Baroon 1842 – 1845, Cairncross Press, Maleny, 1997, pp. 34-35, n.53 and 54.
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...while other explorers’ journeys cost livestock loses and many Indigenous lives
[A] critic of the [Queensland] government was George Elphinstone Dalrymple, “the father of north Queensland”, since appointed lands commissioner for the Kennedy district. Dalrymple spoke with the authority of experience, having conducted several major expeditions in north Queensland with a minimum of violence. Early in his administrative career he advocated that the Native Police be reformed “to try a new and more civilised system of treatment of the Aborigines”. However, rivalry between Dalrymple and his immediate superior, A. C. Gregory, ensured that the recommendation was shelved. A further setback to reform occurred when the Executive Council overruled its governor and vetoed funds for a mission station at the new settlement of Somerset in far north Queensland. The council’s veto appeared particularly cynical, since missionaries for Somerset had not long been dispatched from Britain. Moreover, the success of the mission had already been prejudiced by the bloodthirsty overloading expedition of the two eldest sons of John Jardine, government resident at Somerset from 1863 to 1865. (On 14 May 1864, accompanied by four natives and four Europeans, Frank and Alexander Jardine left Rockhampton, where their father had previously been police magistrate and gold commissioner. At the Mitchell River they withstood a major native attack: “Clad in tatters, wearing hats of emu skin and living on turkey eggs, they reached Somerset on 2nd March, 1865, with 12 horses and 50 cattle”, out of 42 and 250 they had begun with. A large number of natives had been killed en route.) [1]
ADB 4: 471, s.v. “Jardine, John”…John Jardine returned to his old office of police magistrate and gold commissioner at Rockhampton in December 1865.
Acknowledgment: Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, pp. 206-207, 257 n.8.