October 30.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Slavery and abuse of women
Slavery and sealers’ cruel treatment of Aboriginal women.
As long as there were seals there would be sealers. In 1815, the merchant trader William Stewart reported on the sealers’ practice of ‘hunting and foraging’ for Aboriginal women. Once in captivity, the sealers:
transfer and dispose of the [women] from one to another as their own property; very few of them ever see their Native Home again...and, if they do not comply with [the sealers’] desires or orders in hunting, etc., they by way of punishment half hang them, cut their heads with Clubs in a Shocking Manner, or flog them most unmercifully with Cats made of Kangaroo Sinews; several of them have from two to six women, who they claim as their own private property in this Manner. [1]
Only a minority of the women and girls abducted by sealers were alive when government agents set about liberating them in the early 1830s. [2]
...Dozens of contemporary sources assert that Aboriginal warriors were inspired to acts of violence by the abuse of their womenfolk. [3] By the mid-1820s, gangs of sealers and convicts were commonly abducting, raping and often killing Aboriginal women and girls. Occasionally, such men were able to surprise individual females or small groups during the day, though they generally acquired them by ambushing bands as they slept. The Oyster Bay- Big River nations could endure much in the name of preventing an unwinnable war, but this was too much to bear.
...In later life, one convict confessed: ‘It was the custom of the sons and servants of the settlers to lie in ambush for “a mob” of native women and girls, and to seize and to carry away the younger ones whenever an opportunity offered’. He went on to admit that when he and his mates got their hands on a female, ‘we kept her for a few days before we shot her’. [4]
Such shocking stories might be written off as hyperbole, were they not so widely attested to.
Stewart to Campbell, 1815, HRA, series III, vol. II, pp. 575-76.
Clements, The Black War, pp. 197-203.
For example, Plomley Friendly Mission, Journal, 7 July and 29 August 1831, pp. 405,447; Robinson’s report, 25 January 1832, in Plomley, FM, p. 504; Robinson to Burnett, 5 January 1832, TAHO, CSO/318, p.132 etc.
P Fenton, James Fenton of Forth: A Tasmanian Pioneers 1820-1901: A Collection of Essays by and about James Fenton (1820-1901) His Family and Friends, Educare, Melbourne, 2001, p. 201.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter – First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021, pp. 66, 88, 234 n.31, n.32, 239 n.11, n.13, See also pp. 88-90 and a reference to ‘slavery’ – p.66.
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An alternative encounter
Reverend [George Augustus] Middleton was remembered as having a good relationship with local Aboriginal people once settled in Newcastle. John Bingle recalled going with Middleton and a group of over 100 Aboriginal people from Newcastle to Lake Macquarie around 1822, saying:
We enjoyed all the wild sports of Australian bush life in its primitive state as the Aborigines of the day (before they were contaminated with our vices) were accustomed to enjoy them. Shooting, fishing, kangarooing, and hunting – our game was ample for us all. They supplied us also, by diving, with the finest mud oysters, for which the waters of the Lake are noted, these we scalloped on our bush fires, and we spent five or six days of as much enjoyment as I ever had in any part of the world. [1]
J. Bingle, Past and Present Records of Newcastle, New South Wales, Newcastle, Bailey, Son and Harwood, 1873. p. 14
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley, pp. 117-118.