October 16.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Killings and a blind memory
Another dawn raid and a massacre
Specific reports detailed mass killings within one year of the miners' arrival [in the Cooktown area]. In October 1874, after 'the blacks' had speared large numbers of horses near 'Pine Creek', 'diggers' were 'apprehensive' of further 'raids' and decided to act:
22 diggers, well armed, mustered one evening and proceeded up the creek in quest of the blackfellows' camp. After travelling nearly all night, their fires were at last sighted, and the avengers, dividing into two parties, and posting themselves conveniently for the work of dispersion, waited patiently for the dawn. When at last day broke, something like 200 blacks were seen squatting about the fire. The white men soon made their presence known, and in a moment the yelling of the blacks, thus taken by surprise, was horrible**** They did not show fright but ran right in the direction where the second party, who had not yet shown themselves, were posted.****[1]
Each asterisk spoke volumes about the law as practised on the ground of north Queensland's frontier. The Cooktown Courier summed up the general policy towards Aboriginal people in 1878: 'Putting in plain English this is what we Queenslanders do...we set the Native Police on [the Aboriginal inhabitants] to make them “quiet”. This is effected by massacring them indiscriminately'. [2]
The Cooktown Courier, 3 October 1874, syndicated in Northern Argus, 20 October, 1874, p.3
Raymond Evans, 'Across the Queensland Frontier', in Bain Attwood & Stephen Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, National Museum of Australia, 2003, p. 66.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, From The Edge: Australia's Lost Histories, pp.171-172, 235 n. 31, n.32.
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…in official circles of power there is a refusal “to acknowledge the Aboriginal patriots who died defending their country’’ - p.69
...at a local level, community groups (including the descendants of families involved on both sides [of the massacres]) have come together on the anniversaries of massacres such as Coniston, Myall Creek and Ravensthorpe to erect memorials, commemorate the tragic events and listen to one another's stories. They are all inspiring stories of truth-telling and healing that will prove invaluable for a future national body. As ever, governments have yet to catch up. While every state parliament has passed an act of “recognition” (Victoria was the first, in 2004), few of these reassuring declarations have confronted the reality of violent dispossession and almost all are accompanied by “no legal effect” clauses. More importantly, there is no state-sanctioned memorial to the frontier wars in Australia. This absence is one of the most telling “silences” that continues to reign over our “official historical” imagination. Our federal governments have not been able to acknowledge the truth of the nation's violent foundation. While they busily erect monuments to our servicemen and women who fought in conflicts overseas – Canberra's Anzac Parade, with its ever-burgeoning number of war memorials, already resembles the worst of Soviet-era bombast – they refuse to acknowledge the Aboriginal patriots who died defending their country.
...we've turned our eyes from the true site melancholy, loss and “birth” in our history, the land itself – and the encounter between Aboriginal people and those who came from across the seas to claim this land...our governments go to extraordinary lengths to repatriate the bodies of our soldiers buried in unmarked graves on the former battlefields of the Western Front in France, yet show little interest in the repatriation of bodies of Aboriginal warriors, many of them “unknown” and sent back to England during the frontier wars – points yet again to our inability to mourn the dispossession of Aboriginal people. In a very real way, we have continued to circumnavigate the heart of the matter.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Moment of Truth – History and Australia's Future, pp. 68-69.