October 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Another ‘dawn raid’
Another deadly dawn raid...
[In Tasmania] in the early morning of 25 October [1830] in the pouring rain, a group of Oyster Bay and Big River people attempted to force their way through the Line at Three Thumbs between Sandspit River and Prossers Bay but were apparently repulsed. [1] Later that day, Edward Walpole, the leader of one of the skirmishing parties, saw them hunting in the area now known as the Wielangta Forest Reserve. He watched them for several hours until they formed an encampment for the night in a deep scrubby ravine. He then collected the rest of his party, placed them within 300 metres of the Aborigines' camp and waited until dawn to attack. He 'advanced to the first hut where he unexpectedly saw 3 blacks all fast asleep, under some blankets with their dogs'. [2] Walpole continued:
[We] crept to one of the Natives, without being perceived by any of the others in the windbreak and there caught him by the leg. There were five men in the windbreak, and the other four rushed away, while others of the party were stooping to catch them. One, however, was caught, after he had fallen into the creek, and the two were shot. There were five other windbreaks across the creek, and in the centre of a very thick scrub. [3]
Hobart Town Courier, 30 Oct. 1830.
Ibid.
Walpole to Col. Sec., 27 Oct. 1830, TAHO CSO 1/332
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp.137, 373, n. 22, n. 23, n. 24.
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“...complicity in killing, bound participants together in close confederation.”
Moral choice was harder and harsher on the frontier. Refusal to participate in the brutal trade of dispossession was, by definition, a rebuke to those who did and one that was hard to forgive. Tacit disapproval was bad enough. Outright criticism was deeply provocative, profoundly contentious. Settler solidarity was not just comforting. It seemed necessary for survival. The shared guilt of the punitive expedition, the complicity in killing, bound participants together in close confederation. Dissenters who challenged the ways of the frontier were boycotted, bullied or banished. The pioneer Queensland grazier Ernest Thorn refused to allow a party of neighbouring settlers to use his boat to facilitate a nocturnal attack on a neighbouring Aboriginal camp. As a result he acquired a bad name which, he explained, 'followed me for many years, and rose up in judgment against me, in unexpected places, as a dangerous man'. His name was 'covered with opprobrium' and he was branded as a man 'who was false to his race, and unworthy of the confidence of decent white men'. [1]
But all over Australia there were men and women [admittedly a minority] who stood up and demanded justice for the Aborigines, even on the most troubled frontiers and when conflict was at its height.
United Australia, 25 October 1901, p. 14.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. xv-xvi, 253 n. 8.
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Varied responses to the invasion.
Aboriginal people reacted and responded to the invasion of their valley in complex and varied ways. Violent confrontations in the mid- and late-1820s were the most dramatic and obvious response. The drama and tragedy of the frontier, which for many people were inescapable, has in part obscured other interactions...Aboriginal people, both men and women, embraced a wide variety of roles in the colonial period across New South Wales...Aboriginal people were forced to make profound cultural adjustments. To survive, many had to adapt new ways and learn a foreign language, all the while facing the almost overwhelming numbers of British settlers and their stock invading the country around them. Despite a reliance on Aboriginal skill, knowledge and bushcraft, many colonists increasingly considered Aboriginal people to be inferior and dangerous, fostering a growing inequality that meant Aboriginal people were excluded from the very economy that they had helped establish.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley pp. 116-117