October 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Shootings an sheltering
‘Dispersal’ and the shooting of children, women and men.
A correspondent from Rosewood diggings near Rockhampton (south of Morinish) spoke of local 'dispersal...in the usual style'; the reason given was the theft of 'three figs of tobacco, a shirt, box of matches, and piece of damper'. This 'usual style' was performed, the readers were told, early in the morning of 23 October 1867 when they 'went to work, firing at random amongst the sleeping niggers, [sic] who, aroused by the shots, attempted to fly; several were shot dead, and about half a dozen (some of them fatally) wounded. Men, women and children indiscriminately, some of whom, poor unfortunate wretches, have been seen at Rosewood with the bullet wounds. One girl eight years of age was shot through the thigh, and this girl was seen on Rosewood gold diggings, according to a letter in the Bulletin of Thursday last'.
In 1868 the Rockhampton Northern Argus reported a scrimmage between the Indigenous people and the police triggered by some trivial petty theft and it 'resulted in the rascals being (in official language) quietly dispersed'. [1]
Quotes from Brisbane Courier 28 Dec 1864, QSA A/40323/66/10, Q Nov 9, 1867 p7, NA 16 May 1868.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p.36, n.43.
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Justifications and rationalisations
Colonists justified their actions with elaborate rationalisations that invoked God, assumptions of European superiority, and notions of how to discipline children and Blacks. One correspondent, writing in the Darling Downs Gazette on 21 November 1861, criticised the ‘liberal agitation’ of a Brisbane newspaper against the Native Police:
The country does not belong to the black man; it is God’s country. If he put the black man first upon the land. It must be allowed it is through His providence that the white man has come to dispossess that black man of that country which the latter has failed to apply to the purposes of its designed utility. We concur with the ‘Courier’ that the occupation of the country must be held by main force; but we disagree with that contemporary, when he contends that the pastoral pioneers should be allowed to fight it out single-handed with the blacks, unaided by Government police protection. In occupying the country, it is necessary to subjugate the blacks, and the most merciful way of doing this, in the long run, is to treat them with severity at first. If they attempt to massacre the whites, or to wage war against us, they must be shot down, and only when this is done promptly, and effectually, can they be trusted.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 p. 80.
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Some settlers sheltered Indigenous people
There is evidence of settlers sheltering deserters [from the Native Police] and other fugitive Aboriginal people. According to historian Luke Godwin, the Dutton brothers protected Aboriginal people from Native Police in 1861, and one, Henry Dutton, reputedly held a revolver to an officer’s head. [1] Complaints about squatters who protected runaway troopers continued for years...Squatters needing Aboriginal labour protected runaway troopers...
Luke Godwin, ‘The Fluid Frontier: Central Queensland 1845-63’, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, edited by Lynette Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 p.164-165, 286 n.74.