October 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Another ‘dispersal’
Accounts of shootings of Indigenous people
Arthur Ashwin was a stockman and prospector from Adelaide who knew both [Joe] Walker and [Tommy] McBride well. He went prospecting with the former in Western Australia in 1873 and with McBride on the Palmer River in 1875. The two men gave him almost identical descriptions of their 1872 overland journey, which Ashwin included in his reminiscences. 'They had a very rough time with the niggers [sic]' he wrote.
One night, possibly near the Queensland border, the men saw figures in the darkness and began shooting. The Aboriginals then attacked, but after suffering casualties they ran off and all was quiet until the morning: 'then they came in strength and Joe and Billy [Banks] made sure of a nigger [sic] every shot and told [McBride] not to fire and waste cartridges. They soon dispersed them...' That night while camped at what appears to have been the Robinson River, they noticed Aboriginals gliding silently across to the other bank on pandanus logs, a method widely used in the Gulf country and elsewhere in the north to protect against crocodiles. The men assumed another attack was underway.
...just as the moon was going down there was a good mob there and Joe and Billy fired into them as fast as they could. They had two Colt revolvers each and did good work. Tommy McBride did not have a shot. Joe had a shot or two at niggers' [sic] heads as they swam back; they splashed a lot to frighten the alligators. [1]
Walker's party travelled a good distance the next day, probably into the country of another tribe, and had no trouble. As the men were having breakfast the following morning at first light, they noticed about fifty Aboriginals in the distance jogging along in their horse tracks. Without waiting to see if they were friendly, Walker said he would 'give them a lesson'. Jumping on a one-eyed horse he kept saddled near the camp, he galloped straight at the leaders. Only one spear was thrown before they all turned and ran.
Joe followed and galloped on to them one at a time, the blind side of his horse on the [Aboriginals], and he emptied his revolvers on them and then turned back...Joe said; 'I don't think they will trouble us any more'. [2]
They didn't and the party saw no more Aboriginals until it reached Roper River.
Mole Hill, at the junction of the Strangways and Roper Rivers, was already notorious for the aggressive nature of the Mangarrayi people who lived there. [2] At Crescent Lagoon, five kilometres further on, the horses were driven off by Aboriginals who then gave cheek from a distance. Later that day, Walker tracked them on his one-eyed horse and when he caught up with them they ran away, abandoning the horses. Once again Walker 'gave them a lesson which did this tribe good', said Ashwin. [3]
Ashwin, A. C. Gold to Grass: The Reminiscences of Arthur C. Ashwin 1850-1930, Prospector and Pastoralist, Hesperian Press, Victoria Park, 2002: p. 63.
South Australian Register 4.11.1872.
Ashwin 2002: 64.
Acknowledgment: Tony Roberts, frontier justice – A history of the Gulf Country to 1900, pp. 24-25, 268 n.2, n.3, n.4