October 24.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A slave state
Western Australian colony...was described as ‘the slave state of the Australian commonwealth’.
[Historian Chris] Owen...identifies macro-political factors influencing the unfolding tragedy of the colonial situation. The first is the period of British colonial control and the Aborigines Protection Act 1886, when much concern, even outrage, was expressed from London over the horrific treatment of Aborigines in the Western Australian colony, which was described as ‘the slave state of the Australian commonwealth’. The colony’s mistreatment of its Aborigines represented one of the major obstacles to self-rule, but metropolitan critics of colonial violence and dispossession were derided as ‘Exeter Hall types’.
This period was followed by a more overtly violent and oppressive period under the so-called ‘responsible government’ period (1890–1901), during which the dominant pastoral class very much ran their own show. This ushered in a decade of intensely violent subjection of Aboriginal people aimed at outlawing ‘wild natives’ under the guise of preventing ‘stock killings’. Here, Owen provides compelling figures to show that drought, a long tradition of cattle duffing and the industry’s generally poor management and inexperience were more significant factors. Tellingly, these combined losses did not prevent a massive escalation in stock numbers and profits from meat shipped to other parts of the colony throughout the 1890s.
This period included the 1894–97 police/military operations against West Kimberley rebels Jandamarra and his associates, which resulted in at least 80 Aboriginal deaths officially attributed to police violence and larger numbers to the pastoralists’ own ‘dispersals’. The situation in the East Kimberley was even more violent: between July and November 1893 alone, police killings amounted to 81 persons in the Osmand and Ord Valleys. In the same year, Alexander Forrest asked in the Western Australian Parliament whether ‘the life of one European is not worth a thousand natives’ in the interests of expanding their pastoral empires (p. 350). It seems very likely that hundreds of Aborigines were shot with pastoralist consent and assistance. During this period, local police officers were clearing hundreds of people from their traditional lands on charges of cattle killing and also making themselves small fortunes on the side by pocketing the per-head monies provided for rations for their prisoners (a practice that, according to historian Fiona Skyring, continued to make large sums of money for local police in the Kimberley, Pilbara and goldfields under the category of ‘meal money’ right through until 1992 when the Aboriginal Legal Service made it front page news). In this same period, Premier John Forrest was lobbying strenuously for the repeal of British colonial legislation that mandated a minimal level of support of Aboriginal people rendered destitute by the expanding pastoral enterprises, thus ensuring that a workforce recruited through ‘brutal slavery’ would continue to be readily available to the squattocracy (p. 368).
Acknowledgment: Review by Anthony Redmond of Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’: Policing in the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Crawley, 2016, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 41 (2017) pp. 202-203.
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Meanwhile in South Australia...
Wealthy colonists invested in the pastoral industry as a means of making a quick fortune. Many (such as Jones and Morris’s employer) resided in Adelaide while leaving the dirty work of occupying Aboriginal land to their overseers, managers, shepherds and hut-keepers. There is no doubt the majority of early pastoralists were aware of and took a pragmatic and mercenary approach with regard to the means by which Aboriginal land was occupied. Penton’s employer, for example, attempted to ‘conceal’ the murder of his shepherd Scott in order ‘that the shepherds might not be deterred from going out with their sheep’. [1]
Register, 19 September 1849: 3F; GRG 35/1849, SRSA.
Acknowledgment: Skye Krichauff, “The murder of Melaityappa and how Judge Mann succeeded in making ‘the administration of justice palatable’ to South Australian colonists in 1849”, p. 33 n.57