October 21.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The poisonings
“...more than a hundred blacks were stretched...”
…attitudes towards Aboriginal people and frontier violence were clearly hardening during the period from 1850 and into the 1880s. Whereas there were at least a few half-hearted attempts made to instigate inquiries in the 1840s, hardly any such thing happened during the later decades.
A...case from Maryborough in 1856 in which at least four indigenous people died after robbing a quantity of flour from a local store was thus well known to the general public of that period. There was also a case from Beaudesert with at least two victims in 1858, and the researcher cannot help but wonder how many similar cases may have remained hidden from the public. Outback rumour was certainly rife in this respect. Some of these cases would later come out in print such as the one about the wife of a squatter in the Upper Condamine in the late 1850s who was said to have ‘disposed of more indigenous people than any’ other in that district, solely ‘by means of arsenic’. [1]
Harold Finch-Hatton (1856-1904), a well known frontier squatter, proprietor of Mt Spencer station at Nebo, near Mackay, recalled seemingly with some glee, how ‘more than a hundred blacks were stretched’ when a settler of his acquaintance gave them a meal containing ‘something really startling’. To which he added, that in ‘a dry season, when the water sinks low, their skulls are occasionally to be found half buried in the mud’. [2]
Moreton Bay Courier 21 Feb 1860 p4a-b; MBC 24 Feb 1858; DH 14 Jun 1866 p.3, the last quotes from William Stamer, Recollections of a Life of Adventure, London, 1866, Vol. 2 p. 98.
See Captain John Cooley and John Ker Wilson’s testimony to SC-61 p.424 & 477. Indeed poisoning cases were frequently mentioned and accepted as true by various outside squatters during and in connection with the Select Committee – 61 enquiry .
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', pp. 89-90 and n.171, n.172.
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Punitive actions understood as peace-keeping ones.
[In South Australia] the police and overlander parties met a large Maraura group in a tense encounter on the banks of the Rufus River. Feeling vulnerable to imminent attack [Protector of Aborigines Matthew] Moorhouse, abandoned attempts at mediation and gave up his command to [his second in command Sub-Inspector of Police Barnard] Shaw. Without waiting for orders, the overland party opened fire, followed by the police party from the opposite bank of the river. Of the Indigenous group of men, women and children wedged between them, according to Matthew Moorhouses’s report, nearly 30 were killed and many wounded. [1] Once again, other records cast doubt on the estimations of Indigenous deaths. In his memoir published in 1899, James Hawker wrote, ‘in after years, when I was residing in the Murray and had learnt the language of the natives, I ascertained that a much larger number had been killed, for Mr Robinson’s men were all picked marksmen. [2] When the party returned to Adelaide in September [1841] [Governor George] Grey called an inquiry into the massacre. The resolution of the bench of magistrates, moved by Major [Thomas] O’Halloran – conveniently enough, here in his role as justice of the peace – was that the party’s conduct was ‘justifiable, indeed unavoidable, in the circumstances’. [3] The Major’s role in deciding this resolution highlights the irony of a colonial administration in which military-style punitive actions could be understood as peace-keeping ones. In this way the conflict on the upper Murray frontier, which had dragged on from April to August, was finalised in the colonial records.
First report from Moorhouse to Grey, 4 Sepember, 1841. PRSA No. 97, Encl. 1
James Hawker, Early Experiences in South Australia, (E.S. Wigg & Son, 1899), p. 79.
Proceedings of the Meeting of the Bench of Magistrates, 20-22 September 1841. PRSA, No. 98/Enclosure.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian frontier and the violence of memory, Wakefield Press, Mile End, 2017, pp.34, 145-146, n.21, n.22, n.23