May 31.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Laments and Chains
“On many mornings and evenings I heard their loud laments.”
The London German Sunday School Society also promised to assist [the Lutheran Pastor A.L.C. Kavel in South Australia]. On 21 May 1838, Pastor Christian Gottlob Teichelmann and his former student, Pastor Clamor Wilhelm Schurmann, sailed from London. [1]
…The missionaries rapidly became involved in the affairs of the Aboriginal people. They soon realised that in and around Adelaide they were not observing unspoiled traditional Aboriginal society, but its disintegration. They were distressed by the treatment of the Aborigines. On 31 May 1839 they witnessed the ‘sad spectacle’ of the hanging of three Aborigines convicted of murder. ‘The sensation of the colonists was great,’ wrote Schurmann. [2]
Unlike the other colonists, the missionaries knew of the deep sorrow of the Aboriginal kinfolk. ‘On many mornings and evenings I heard their loud laments,’ wrote Schurmann. [3] In time, the missionaries were to come to understand the gross injustice of what was happening but already felt uneasy.
A.G. Price, Founders and Pioneers of South Australia, F.W.Preece & Son, Adelaide, 1929, p.201
Edwin A. Schurmann, I’d Rather Dig Potatoes: Clamor Schurmann and The Aborigines of South Australia, Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, 1987, p. 49.
Schurmann, 31 May 1839, in Schurmann, 1987: 40-41.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 321-323, 376 n.34, n.46, n.47.
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“For Indigenous peoples, the impact of separating us from our heritage goes directly to the heart that pumps life through our peoples. To expect a people to be able to enjoy their culture without their cultural heritage and their sacred belongings, is equivalent to amputating their legs and digging up the ground and asking them to run a marathon.” ~ Mick Dodson
From: azquotes.com
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The use of chains
The history of these first years of the pastoral industry from the pastoralists' perspective is thoroughly documented through the legislation, commissions and reports of the period. Arranged chronologically these merge into a one-sided account of history. New laws were defined by and for the colonists to serve their interests, and they reflect the prevailing political and social climate. The legislation gave the pastoralists and the police extensive powers to control and restrict the lives of the Aboriginal people. The police, paradoxically empowered under the 1886 Aborigines Protection Act as 'honorary protectors' of the Aborigines, were paid an allowance of 2s. 5d. 'per knob' per day for all natives arrested as suspects and as witnesses to raids on stock [1] This made it profitable for the police to arrest as many as possible and it was those living outside the emerging authority of the pastoral industry who were arrested.
Chained together neck to neck, wrist to wrist, the long lines of prisoners, men, women and children wound their way over the bush tracks to receive sentence in Wyndham, Derby or Halls Creek... acquittals were nil. Brief scattered entries reveal Father's growing sense of discomfiture at the situation: 'Am disgusted at the spectacle of a party of niggers [sic] on the road with police, the chains in many instances much too short from neck to neck, chafing and pulling as they move along and all appearing half starved'. [2]
M. Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, Sydney, 1967, p.370.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Pamela A Smith, “Station camps: legislation, labour relations and rations on pastoral leases in the Kimberley region, Western Australia”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 24 (2000) p.77.
See also Chris Owen “How Western Australia’s ‘unofficial’ use of neck chains on Indigenous people lasted 80 years”. The [Australian] Guardian, Sunday, 7 March, 2021.