October 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Kidnapping & Shooting
Extensive kidnapping of Aboriginal women and children
Strangely enough, while the Aborigines of the North Queensland mining fields have attracted a romantic interest because of their fierce resistance, there is much ignored evidence available which suggests that the invaders' brutality and callousness provided much of the motivation. For apart from the Aborigines' natural resentment of the European and Native Police violence and the Chinese intrusion, there was similar extensive kidnapping of Aboriginal women and children to that encountered on the pastoral frontier. Frontier mailman and prospector, J.C. Hogflesh, asserted that the carriers on the Palmer Road were the worst offenders and Binnie's account of his life on the Palmer from 1876 to 1882 supports this. He described how one passing bullock team gave or sold a twelve-year-old black girl to the wife of the teamster transporting Binnie and his mother from Cooktown to the Palmer. The girl could not understand English and was very frightened, especially of the teamster who threatened to shoot two Aboriginal men working for him (and later did), fired shots at night to warn off local Aborigines, and horse-whipped her when she refused to fetch water from a nearby lagoon because of her fear that local Aborigines were hiding there. The disgusted teamster's wife gave her to the owner of a passing bullock team, asking that she be sent to a friend in Brisbane to be 'educated'. [1] Carrier W.H. Corfield recorded how the six-year-old survivor of a Native Police dispersal at the Laura River was retained by Sub-Inspector O'Connor's troopers as a camp pet but, 'knowing I had no blackboy, he gave me the little fellow he had so well drilled'. [2]
J.C. Hogflesh, Herberton, to B.D. Morehead, Chief Sec., 8 October 1889, Q.S.A. COL/A595, 9567 of 1889; J.H. Binnie, My Life on a Tropic Gold Field, pp. 8-11.
Corfield, Reminiscences, p. 59.
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp. 79-80, 268 n. 62, n.63.
____
“...whitefellows shootem alabout Blackfellow.”
John Bowyer Bull worked for various leaseholders in several parts of South Australia and his ‘Reminiscences’ provide a unique and detailed insight into the everyday detail of pastoral life in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1855 he took up a job with John Chambers on his Bobmoonie...West Run, north of Oratunga and east of Beltana. Bull’s first job for Chambers was to drive 7000 sheep from the latter’s Minbrie Run near Franklin Harbour on Eyre Peninsula to Bobmoonie, riding north past Aroona to reach his destination. His handwritten diary entry describes the trip as follows:
I did not see my Black friends on the road back & was rather glad, after I heard the way other whites had been treeting them. And knowing there law is man for man, of course they look on the white man as there jeneral enemy, taking there waters and hunting grounds from them and giving them no recompence for it, but shooting them down so what do they care who the white man is as long as they see an easy chance for revenge...On my road up to my destenation, at Wolpena & Aroona Stations, I saw nothing but Black women in the camps, I asked the reason and they told me whitefellows shootem alabout Blackfellow. [1] [Spelling is original to the quote.]
Bull is describing Aroona in August 1855, over three years after the Richardson murder and the ensuing ‘campaign’. His discovery on the road up to Aroona and Wilpena of Yura camps without men can be interpreted two ways. First, Bull’s words clearly suggest that [pastoralist J.F.] Hayward’s representation of the campaign as achieving little more than frightening a few Yuras can be challenged. Second, he records an Indigenous storytelling tradition of anecdotes about the killing of Yura people in the Flinders Ranges.
J.B. Bull, Reminiscences 1835-94, South Australian Archives 950, p. 75 – Original spelling.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions, pp. 104, 158 n.43