May 28.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Two massacres
Queensland snapshot of a massacre
Aborigines coming into the mission brought the first news of police mayhem. On 28 May [1927] the nursing sisters told [Ernest] Gribble that the parties passing the station were in a state of ‘fear and fright’. Then the wounded began to appear - a man with buttocks full of buck-shot, another with a bullet wound in the leg. [1] An Aboriginal woman called Looabane arrived with her brother. She was wounded; the brother named six kin who had been shot and killed by police. Looabane told one of the nurses a truly terrible story. She explained that
the police got all those Aborigines from the Kular tribe that lived from the coast to the mission…they put the men on one chain and the women with their children and their kids on another chain…they killed the men. They just lined them up and shot them one by one…the women had to watch those men being shot…their husbands and brothers and relatives…the men had to collect fire wood first. They didn’t know why they had to collect wood but they had to get a big pile of it…They lined them up and shot them…then they cut them into pieces, you know, a leg, an arm, just like that and those bits of body were thrown on the wood…and burnt there. [2]
…Rumour about massacre was one thing, actual proof quite another. That was eventually forthcoming towards the end of August. Gribble’s educated Aboriginal assistant, James Noble, followed the tracks of the police party and found the place where an unknown number of Aborigines had been shot and their bodies burnt. He scooped up several shovelfuls of charred remains and returned to the mission.
Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing, op. cit., p.417.
Gribble Diary, 6 July 1926, quoted by Halse, op. cit., p.285.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 182-183, 265 n. 12, n.13.
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...and a massacre in Northern Australia
Brown's narrative of the massacre at Cocaranup is consistent with the authenticating criteria identified by Deborah Bird Rose's informants in Northern Australia, although Scott's research fails to uncover any definitive first-hand written account. [1] Brown as elder, has status as a reliable informant; she is specific about the location, sequence of events and the names of those involved, and also refers to human remains. She begins with an account of the rape of a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl by a white settler, in the context of regular abuses of Aboriginal women. She names the victim, the alleged perpetrator and the Aboriginal man who speared him in reprisal. According to Brown, government permission was then secured to kill 17 Aboriginal people from Ravensthorpe. However alternative Indigenous sources quoted by Scott state that over 30 people were killed, including people from Hopetoun and Jerdacuttup who were visiting for meetings about initiations and marriage. Brown states that the massacre site is now fenced off and belongs to the Boy Scouts. In recounting an occasion when she and her husband were driving past the area, she introduces an element of spirituality and mourning. A thick mist arose and covered the road: 'Must've been old people crying', she reflects.
Rose 2003:129-5.
Acknowledgment: Review by Rosamund Dalziell of Kayang and Me by Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, 270pp, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Western Australia, 2005, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 30 (2006) pp. 220-224.