September 8.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Another dawn attack
A massacre occurred at the site which became known as Butchers Creek.
On the upper reaches of the Mulgrave River, a group of 100 Malanbarra Yidinydji, while participating in a significant cockatoo ceremony, were attacked by the explorer Christie Palmerston and his Ngadjanydji carriers. Palmerston wrote on 8 September 1886, that Cockatoo Bora Ground was:
...large and original, situated on the west bank of the Mulgrave. In the centre of the ground were dug two long parallel rows of oval-shaped holes, filled with crouching figures, that portion just below the armpits and upwards being the only part exposed. Quivering tufts of cockatoo feathers decorated their nodding heads; bunches of larger white fluttering feathers were fixed along their arms and hands, which they worked in wing-wave fashion; the face and other parts of the body were formed in stripes of finer white down...their nodding heads accompanied a bantering vein of cockatoo's screaches, [sic] which ended occasionally with roars of wild mirth...I placed my boys three parts round the borah ground, which I attacked shortly after day-dawn...After reducing heaps of war implements to ashes, we moved towards home, taking two young prisoners with us. [1]
Paul Savage analyses Palmerston's diary entries and makes the observation that Palmerston was 'embroiled by his [Ngadjanydji] carriers in a feud with another thribe [the Malanbarra Yidinydji]' and that after writing 2200 words on the lead-up description, he passed over 'what should have been the climax of the chase, the dawn attack', in just eight words. Savage contends that 'As if to balance the understated violence of this episode, CP [Christie Palmerston] ends his account of this part of the expedition with a long, consciously gruesome account of funeral rites he witnessed'. [2] It is difficult to assess what the Malanbarra casualties were, but there can be no doubt they were sizeable.
Depredations were sometimes followed by the murder of a white man, which regularly led to a violent European response culminating in a massacre...It appears likely that as a result of [the] murder [in Coopooroo Creek of John Clifford by Aboriginal assailants], a massacre occurred at the site which became known as Butchers Creek. [3] The late Ngadjanydji Elder, Molly Raymond, recalled her mother, Granny Emily, finding her 'husband shot and hung up on a tree, but still alive, [he] tried to push his stomach back, but couldn't'. Molly's mother and grandmother found refuge with the Malanbarra Yidinydji on the Mulgrave River:
...as all their people up the top [of the range] had been attacked at [the] corroboree, [and because the] Police [were] around the district all the time – around Herberton way – hunting [and] killing people...One girl [was] dragged through a blazing camp fire [by the Native Police], she escaped and hid in a log, but they found her and killed her and then [the Native Police] were sitting down and cutting her up like meat. [4]
P. Savage, Christie Palmerston Explorer, JCU, Townsville, 1989, pp. 205-6.
Savage, Palmerston, pp. 178-80.
E.H. Short, The Nation Builders, Self-published, Dimbulah, 1988, p.55. Interview with Molly Raymond, Black Oral History Collection (BOHC), JCU, Townsville, 1989. Molly Raymond died 4 May 1991, aged 102 years. H & M E Tranter (eds), Malanda: In the Shadow of Bartle Frere, Eacham Historical Society (EHS), 1995, p.6. The name 'Butchers Creek' appears to stem from this event. See J May, Eacham Shire Historical Data, EHS, 1959, p.3A.
Molly Raymond, BOHC Black Oral History Collection, James Cook University, School of History and Politics, (accessed 1989).
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, 149-150 238 n.74, n.75, n.78, n.79.