May 1.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The Cost in Lives
The cost in lives and relationships that colonisation brought to Indigenous people.
Seven years earlier [1869], when considering whether colonists 'shall admit the blacks', one author's view expressed in the Port Denison Times traced it to a station:
...not 100 miles from the Burdekin [Woodstock?]... That stood foremost in slaughtering the blacks and admitting the gins there can be no doubt. There have long been rumours of cruel doings there, but the last is not the least...the gins were admitted, whilst the few surviving husbands had to stand far off gazing with longing eyes from the mangroves at their white tormentors living promiscuously with their wives. [1]
The Bowen newspaper also warned:
We know the storm that was raised in England against Governor Eyre about the Jamaican riot, yet...the whole sacrifice of life...did not exceed four hundred. What then will the people of England say when they learn that more than this number of natives fall each year in Queensland, partly by the hands of the settlers and partly by a blood-thirsty Native Police...illegally constituted.
Port Denison Times, 1 May 1869.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 59, 219 n.46.
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Australian historians have only recently rediscovered the violence used to secure the conquest and effect the pioneering of the continent. Yet almost every district settled during the [nineteenth century] had a history of conflict between local clans and encroaching settlers. Many of the Europeans who lived through the time of confrontation were quite realistic about the cost of colonisation. A small town pioneer wrote in 1869 that his community 'had its foundations cemented in blood'. [1] 'I believe I am not wrong in stating', observed another, 'that every acre of land in these districts was won from the Aborigines by bloodshed and warfare'. [2] Black resistance in its many forms was an inescapable feature of life on the fringes of European settlement from the first months at Sydney Cove until the early years of the [twentieth century]. The intensity and duration of conflict varied widely depending on terrain, indigenous population densities, the speed of settlement, the type of introduced economic activity, even the period of first contact.
'Shall We Admit the Blacks'? No. 2. Port Denison Times, 1 May 1869.
G.E. Loyau: The History of Maryborough Brisbane, 1897, p.3.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side Of The Frontier, pp. 50, 174 n. 1, n. 2.
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A saddened George Bridgman wrote to Edward M Curr, an ethnologist, that in the first decade of European occupation of the Mackay district (1860s), 'about one half of the Aboriginal population was either shot down or perished from loathsome diseases...the black troopers, however...have been the chief destroyers'. [1] This resulted in a preponderance of Aboriginal females and children in the region. [2]
Port Denison Times, 1 May 1869.
Queenslander, 18 March 1876, p.12.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp 59, 219 n.44, n.45.
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[Shortly after the Myall Creek trial in 1838] Governor Gipps declined to prosecute New South Wales police who had shot dead a dozen or so Aboriginal people in a frontier clash in order to avoid offending the voluntary police force. [1]
Alex C. Castles, An Australian Legal History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, p. 521-522.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 4, 187 n.17.