May 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Further ‘dispersals’
Interwoven violence and “deadly dispersals”
The first European foods with which Aboriginal people supplemented their natural diet were gifts. The white settlers, however, had no intention of giving food away indefinitely, whereas Aboriginal people began to perceive it as a right, even as a kind of payment or rent for the land occupied by the Europeans. When the gifts stopped, they turned to taking what they wanted. The most obvious targets were animals and vegetables. The idea of ownership of animals and plants was foreign. Aboriginal people do not necessarily perceive them as property in the same way as white settlers did.
Killing and retaliation were, it would seem, inevitable, yet there was a dreadful inevitability, too, that the war should begin, not over the grosser injustice of the invasion of Aboriginal land, but over the taking of such trivial yet symbolic property as a few European vegetables growing in Aboriginal soil. The Aboriginal retaliation was led by Midgegoroo and his son Yagan. Attempts to capture them only exacerbated the situation. They became active and successful guerrilla fighters for several years.
When Yagan's brother was killed, Aborigines retaliated by attacking settlers on the Canning river, which led to their being declared outlaws. Midgegoroo was captured and publicly executed by firing squad in May 1833. [1] The Perth Gazette expressed this criticism of the onlookers:
The feeling which was generally expressed was that of satisfaction at what had taken place and in some instances of loud and vehement exultation, which the solemnity of the scene, a fellow being – albeit a native – launched into eternity ought to have suppressed. [2]
Yagan was killed in July by two youths, William and James Keats, who first won his confidence, shared his food and then shot him.
McNair and Rumley, 1981:5
Perth Gazette, 25 May 1833
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 256-257, 307 n. 2, n.3.
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More dispersals
The next report, authored at Paterson Police Station on 3 July 1889, included four dispersals. These followed an early morning attack on 6 May 1889 on two stockmen camped at the otherwise fortified Mein Telegraph Station...on the upper part of Cape York in far north Queensland. The attack resulted in the injuring of Jim Evans and the 'murder' of his mate, the 20 years old 'Eddie' or Edmund Schamlyn Watson...[Native Police Officer Frederic] Urquhart went in pursuit of the culprits, taking with him 'Grandie' [Grandison] Watson, plus five troopers and thirteen horses. They managed to corner and dispersed the first lot in 'a swamp full of water and timber' on the 25 May [1889] from where, Urquhart later reported, many Aboriginals 'escaped arrest'. The phrase 'escaped arrest', however, simply meant – escaped death! There are no signs that Urquhart, or any other Queensland Native Police officer, ever seriously attempted to arrest Indigenous people on such expeditions. Urquhart went on to qualify, saying 'when they refused to stand they were fired upon' until most of them managed to escape and 'very little execution was done upon this occasion'.
They had much more luck a few days later when they 'came up with a large mob in a dense fern scrub covering about five acres of ground which I succeeded in completely surrounding'. Urquhart did not reveal exactly how many Aboriginal men he managed to kill at any of these occasions, nor did he mention anything about women and children. In the latter case he simply stated that he and his men began shooting when the surrounded mob 'got together in a body and made a rush to break out'. He then noted that 'none of the murderers escaped from this scrub', the logic obviously being that any Aboriginal killed was a murderer. How many 'a large mob' was, we can only guess, but judging from this and other contemporary reports, it was probably no less than fifty.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, pp. 55-56.