May 13.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Elliston killings
Controversy to this day surrounds the recollection of the killing of Indigenous people at Waterloo Bay at Elliston in South Australia in 1848. There are different versions, different memories, different forgetfulness.
According to one source, Iris Burgoyne’s memoir entitled Mirning: We Are The Whales, [1] a significant number of Aboriginal people, numbering about 200, lived in the vicinity of Elliston on the South Australian coast. The saga was prompted by deaths of both whites and Aboriginal people. Hutkeeper John Hamp was killed, then five Aboriginal people died from being poisoned.[1] Then followed the separate killing of Captain Beevor and Anne Easton. Two Aboriginal men were found guilty of committing Beevor’s murder and were hanged publicly near to Beevor’s hut.
Another similar incident occurred at Elliston. Two Aboriginal men were accused of stealing sheep. The trial was held in Elliston and both men, being found guilty by the white authorities, were hanged within the town. Retribution followed in terms of an attack being made upon the presiding judge by angry Aboriginal inhabitants of the area. He was beaten unconscious and hung up to humiliate him.
Burgoyne indicates that the police, with local assistance, executed retribution.
The police rounded up farmers with about ten horses and rode out to the [Aboriginals’] camp. They herded all the Aboriginal men, women and children like animals and forced them off the cliffs. People tried to escape, but they were cut down by whips, sticks and guns.[2]
A descendant of one of the survivors, a man named Spencer Peel recounts that “ his great-grandmother, a member of the Barngarla tribe...and a number of others were ambushed by a posse of white men on horseback. Holding her young son, who was three or four, she took flight, fleeing through the low scrub toward the coast. After a time she became exhausted. No longer able to carry her son, she hid him in a tree, telling him to stay out of sight until she returned. According to Peel, she was then chased toward the sheer cliffs near what is now the town of Elliston where, according to legend, she and 200 other Aboriginal people were driven over the edge to their deaths”. [3]
The numbers are contested. Indigenous people claim this large figure, a number of white memories reduce the numbers down to much lower estimates.
That there were tragic deaths on both sides is fact. That the number of Aboriginal deaths far outnumbered the white deaths is not out of kilter with the accounts we have across the Australian continent of the consequences of conlict between Aboriginal people and police led retributory posses.
Those poisoned were “Karakundere and Yurdlarir (boys of ten or thirteen), Puyultu and Ngamania (husband and wife) and Pirrape (an infant)...the person responsible was hut-keeper Patrick Dwyer.” - Robert Foster,Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions – The South Australian frontier and the violence of memory, Wakefield Press, Mile End, 2017,.p. 47. See also chapter 3 ‘Recalling the Elliston Incident’, pp. 44-73
Iris Burgoyne, Mirning: We Are The Whales,Magabala Books, Broome, W.A., 2000, p. 115
The Sydney Morning Herald – ‘GoodWeekend’ 25 January, 2020, pp. 16-17
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A way forward offered...
What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control exerted on us to make us like you. And you should take a step further and recognise us for who we are, and not who you want us to be. Let us be who are - Aboriginal people in a modern world – and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past has thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people – our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.
Acknowledgment: Galarrwuy Yunupingu, 'Rom Watangu: 'The Law of the Land', The Monthly, July 2016, p. 28.