May 17.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

The point of a colony was to occupy territory of conquered peoples…

Senior Government official led a massacre

A few weeks after Quaker missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker [had been entertained by Governor Richard Bourke] Backhouse offered him a critique of the grim history of the Colony so far:

It is scarcely to be supposed that in the present day any persons of reflection will be found who will attempt to justify the measures adopted by the British, in taking possession of the territory of this people, who had committed no offence against our nation; but who, being without strength to repel invaders, had their lands usurped, without any attempt at purchase by treaty, or any offer of reasonable compensation, and a class of people introduced into their country, amongst which were many, both free and bond, who, regardless of law, and in great measure exempt from its operation by the remoteness of their situation, practised appalling cruelties upon this almost helpless race. And when any of them have retaliated, they have brought upon themselves the vengeance of British strength, by which beyond a doubt, many of the unoffending have been destroyed, along with those who had ventured to return a small measure of these wrongs upon their white oppressors. [1]

Backhouse did not plead for dispossession to cease. The point of a colony was, after all, to occupy the territory of conquered peoples… Bourke [refused] to punish the murderers among his officials. Returning from the country that he named Australia Felix, the Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell reported, in rather a jaunty way, a massacre he conducted on the Murray River by trapping about 180 “lynx-eyed” savages in a pincer movement:

Attacked simultaneously by both parties, the whole betook themselves to the river; my men pursuing them and shooting as many as they could. Numbers were shot in swimming across the Murray, and some even after they had reached the opposite shore, as they ascended the bank. Amongst those shot in the water, was the chief (recognised by a particular kind of cloak he wore, which floated after he went down). Thus, in a very short time, the usual silence of the desert prevailed on the banks of the Murray, and we pursued our journey unmolested. [2]

As many as forty died To commemorate the rout, Mitchell named a nearby hill Mount Dispersion. It still bears that name. Bourke was appalled by the killing and the tone of Michell’s report. But Mitchell wasn’t charged. He wasn’t even dismissed. All Bourke and his Executive Council delivered was a withering rebuke.

1. Backhouse to Bourke, 25 April, 1837. Extracts from the Letters of James Backhouse Whilst Engaged in a Religious Visit to Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and South Africa accompanied by George Washington Walker,Part 5, Harvey and Dalton, London, 1841,pp. 50-1.

2. Extract from Minute No. 29 of the proceedings of the Executive Council, dated 16 December 1836, in NSW Government Gazette, 21 January 1837, p.59.

Acknowledgmen: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp.71-73, 425.