September 18.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
A rifle – a ‘splendid civilizer’
Range of firearms used by police to shoot at Indigenous people.
Native Police officers and their troopers were armed with British .577 calibre Snider military rifles which fired a massive lead bullet designed to mushroom on impact, leaving a gaping hole. These bullets had a hollow internal chamber in the nose and would therefore be illegal in modern warfare. [1] A resident of the Cooktown district once remarked: 'A Snider is a splendid civilizer'. [2]
...the rifles used by the party [led by Native Police Officer D'arcy Uhr]* [2] were .45 calibre military weapons designed for killing at great distances – certainly beyond a kilometre. Against indigenous peoples with wooden spears and clubs, these were weapons of enormous superiority. There were five Westley Richards, which were far better than the old Snider, while Uhr had a state-of-the-art Martini-Henry, adopted by the British army in 1871 as a replacement for the Snider. Among other things, the Martini-Henry was noted for its rapid rate of fire and flat trajectory. Its massive bullet was nearly three times the weight of a 303 used by British and Australian forces in the two world wars. [3] An expert on the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, in which British soldiers used Martini-Henry rifles, has noted:
The large, heavy .45 caliber bullets of the Martini-Henry inflicted horrific wounds on the attacking Zulus, and many who limped off the battlefield with bullet wounds died an agonising, painful, slow death...Considering bullet weight and velocity, it is probable that many rounds fired from 200 yards or less went through one Zulu Warrior and possibly into a next, severely wounding or killing him as well.
He estimated that roughly as many died later from their wounds as were killed outright. [4] These rifles were adopted by the Northern Territory police in the early 1880s.
Snider bullets had a closed point but were otherwise very similar to the so-called dumdum bullets (those with hollow points, designed originally for big game hunting but used by the British in their military rifles until they were banned.)
Cooktown Courier 25. 1. 1879 in Reynolds ed Race Relations in North Queensland, 1978: 135.
During official tests in 1867 the Martini-Henry fired 20 rounds in 48 seconds and its480 grain (31.2g) bullet had a trajectory of just 2.59 feet (79 centimetres) at 1,000 yards (914 metres), according to 'The Future Weapon of the British Soldier' in The Living Age, May 1869 reproduced at www.researchpress.co.uk/firearms/martini-henry.htm The .303 bullet had a weight of 174 grains (11.31g).
J.M. Atkin, www.martinihenry.com
Acknowledgment: Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 13, 17-18, 267 n.30, n.31, p. 268 n.45, n.46.
* For further on D'arcy Uhr, see entry for 13 June 5 and 6 September.
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Incitement for, and incidents of, massacres.
Colonists giving evidence to the Aborigines' Committee believed that force was necessary. Roderick O'Connor, for example, thought it 'impossible to suppress them by open force'; the Aborigines should be fought not openly but in a silent war marked by the genocidal ambush. O'Connor advocated 'some of the worst characters would be the best to send after them', citing a colonist called Douglas Ibbens who had killed half the eastern tribe 'by creeping upon them and firing amongst them with his double-barrelled gun'. [1]
Shaw (ed) 1971, p. 55
Acknowledgment: Shayne Breen, ‘Human agency, historical inevitability and moral culpability: Rewriting black-white history in the wake of Native Title’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 20 (1996) p. 123 n.48.