October 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Windberry
Windberry, seeking in vain to defend his people.
As whites reacted with violence, blacks living at Protector Parker's camp at Sunbury warned that they too would 'by and by take to the mountains, and try to drive the “white fellows” from their country’.
[Superintendent C.J.] La Trobe's alarm at these developments echoed in Sydney. Governor Gipps despatched Major Lettsom of the 80th Regiment to Port Phillip with a strong contingent of soldiers and Mounted Police, bearing orders to arrest any blacks found carrying arms...
La Trobe cautioned Major Lettsom, that 'wherever the first fault may have been', the natives were becoming 'more and more decidedly hostile' and able to 'set our power almost at defiance'. But they had to be taught a lesson, 'for their own ultimate good'. Lettsom and his force of nearly sixty troopers should try to 'overawe' any opposition, arrest the ringleaders and remove their guns without shedding blood...Major Lettsom awaited his opportunity. On a Saturday night, 10 October 1840, Goulburn blacks visiting Melbourne exhausted themselves in one of their regular corroborees with the Yarra tribe.
Very early on Sunday morning Lettsom's men surrounded the blacks' camp. First they bludgeoned or stabbed all the dogs. When Protector Parker arrived a little later, he reported: 'Great numbers of the dogs belonging to the Aborigines were lying about dead or miserably dying'.
The black leader, Windberry, heard the commotion, leapt up and grabbed his weapons. As he raised his waddy to club Lieutenant F.D. Vignolles, he was shot dead by Sergeant Denis Leahy. Inquiring later into the circumstances, Protectors Robinson and Parker concluded that as Windberry was resisting arrest for a felony, 'his death must be regarded as a justifiable homicide'.
The remaining 300 or so blacks were rounded up at bayonet point in the early dawn light and marched into the township, the men shouting and groaning, women and children keening and weeping. As they milled around inside the gaol stockade, they cried to Parker: 'Are we going to be shot? - to be sent in big ship to Sydney?'
Next day most Yarra Aboriginals were identified and released, but more than thirty visiting Goulburn blacks were locked into the basement of the newly erected Commissariat store...
The blacks remaining in Melbourne Gaol were clamped in irons while attempts were made to gather evidence of their depredations on the Goulburn River. On 16 November the magistrates found no case against twenty men, but committed the remaining ten for trial. One fell ill with 'gaol fever', and died. All the Goulburn men still in gaol were found guilty of theft and sentenced to ten years' transportation. This involved shipping them to Sydney to serve their sentences with white 'lifers' on Cockatoo Island.
On 14 January 1841 the convicted blacks, still in irons, were placed on a barge to travel down the Yarra to the shipping point at Williamstown. 'At a signal', wrote La Trobe, 'they jumped overboard...eight of the nine disappeared under water, or in the thick tea-tree scrub lining the banks.' the ninth man, Turratt Mullin, was shot in the hand and recaptured.
Acknowledgment: Michael Cannon, Who Killed the Koories? - The true, terrible story of Australia’s founding years, William Heinemann, 1990, pp. 33-36.