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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Cullin-la-ringo, a massacre of whites and disproportionate white revenge.
After a long journey from Victoria with his family, servants, stockmen, wagons and over 7000 sheep, Horatio Wills pitched his tents by the Nogoa River in early October, 1861...the family had been at Cullin-la-ringo for ten days when about a hundred Gayiri men and women descended on their camp and killed them all in broad daylight. Among the nineteen dead were seven children. Though they had many guns to defend themselves, the only shot fired in the attack was from Wills’ revolver. His head was nearly severed. Bodies were left scattered among the tents. Absent that day, and the only survivor of the family, was their son ‘Thomas’. News of the killing at Cullin-la-ringo broke around the world. It remains the bloodiest massacre by blacks in the history of Australia.
“An uncontrollable desire for vengeance took possession of every heart,” [Governor] Bowen told the Duke of Newcastle, The Secretary of State for the Colonies. Bowen hade no quarrel with such “just chastisement”. All over the north, settlers and Native police rode out to kill. Scrubs and mountains were scoured. Blacks were shot and driven over cliffs. TheRockhampton Bulletin reported the clashes with something like delight.
The Native police overtook the tribe of natives who committed the late outrage at Nogoa, and succeeded in driving them into a place from whence escape was impossible. They then shot down sixty or seventy, and they only ceased firing upon them when their ammunition was expended. [1]
Those who sought shelter in Rockhampton – “the little town of mud and dust” – [2] were driven back out into the bush to be shot. As it was after Hornet Bank, [3] blacks were executed hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime. Runs [in central Queensland] on the Comet, the Nogoa, the Dawson and the Mackenzie [rivers] were stripped of Aborigines. About four hundred are thought to have died in the weeks after Cullin-la-ringo, but that is no more than a cautious guess. The Yiman, Gayiri and Darumbal peoples were nearly wiped out.
1. Rockhampton Bulletin, 30 November 1961, p. 2.
2. Judith Wright, the Cry for the Dead, p. 121.
3. A reference to the Hornet Bank massacre of whites in October, 1858. That hostile act was prompted by the whites poisoning a local clan of Indigenous people, the killing of twelve station-working blacks and the raping of Indigenous women – Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence – Queensland’s frontier killing times, p.41.
Acknowledgment: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp. 249-251, 439.