September 14.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
A dawn police raid
A dawn raid by police and the killing of Aboriginal children.
With the stimulus of mining activities, white pioneers of the cattle industry were spurred to take up runs in the newly explored areas [of north Queensland]. Wrotham Park was established between the Walsh and Mitchell Rivers in 1873, Mt Mulgrave in 1875, Mitchell Vale in 1876 and Emerald End in 1877. [1]
East of the Hodgkinson's goldfields, the port of Cairns was established in October 1876 to service the new mining ventures, which also attracted other forms of metal extraction, such as tin. Within eight years, in December 1884, one of Cairns District's best-kept secrets had occurred. At a site not far north of Allumbah Pocket (which became Yungaburra in 1910), eighteen-year-old Jack Kane, who had arrived in Cairns in 1882, told 'without an ounce of emotion, as plain fact', [2] how:
...[i]n 1884 he took part in a police raid which lasted a week, culminating in a round up at Skull Pocket and others following at Mulgrave River and near the Four Mile [Woree]. At Skull Pocket police officers and native trackers surrounded a camp of Idindji [Yidinydji] [3] blacks before dawn, each man armed with a rifle and revolver. At dawn one man fired into their camp and the natives rushed away in three other directions. They were easy running shots, close up. The native police rushed in with their scrub knives and killed off the children. A few years later a man loaded up a whole case of skulls and took them away as specimens. [4] [Old Jack stated] 'I didn't mind the killing of the "bucks" but I didn't quite like them braining the kids.' From Skull Pocket the raiders journeyed to the Mulgrave & again at [the] Four mile, and shot other natives, some of them with wounds received in the raid at Skull Pocket. [5]
Michael O'Leary, writing as 'Coyyan', many years later recalled a 'most imposing sight was when he struck Skelton Creek, for nearly every stump or tree had a nigger's [sic] skull as a trophy of the days when "dispersing" was the law. When we made camp, I strolled around and counted sixteen of these gruesome relics'. [6]
J W Collinson, Early Days of Cairns, Smith & Paterson, Brisbane, 1939, p.10; G Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, ANUP, Canberra, 1963, pp. 91-95; D Jones, Trinity Phoenix, Cairns and District Centenary Committee, 1976, p. 51.
Jack Kane to Dr N B Tindale, Tindale Exploration Diary between 11 and 13 September 1938, Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition, 1938. He arrived as a sixteen-year-old in 1882.
Dulguburra [ dulgu – 'scrub'/rainforest, barra – 'people belonging to' Yidinydji, roughly encompassing the area from old Top Gate (on the Gillies Highway) to Lake Barrine to Kulara and Skull Pocket. Personal Communication with respected Yidinydji elder, Nganybabana (George Davis), 5 January 1999. See R M W Dixon, Words of Our Country, UQP, St Lucia, 1991, p. 190; see also J. Covacevich, A Irvine & G Davis, 'A Rainforest Pharmacopoeia' in J. Peran (ed), Pioneer Medicine in Australia, Amphon Press, Brisbane, 1988, pp. 159-74.
The Acting Director of the Queensland intelligence and Tourist Bureau in Brisbane, on 3 December 1917, requesting the Queensland Museum receive 'One (1) Case of Ethnological Specimens (Aboriginal skulls) forwarded from Cairns by Messrs Bolands Ltd. At the request of Mr A Weston.' [Queensland Museum, 00599, 5 December 1917 (HSC, D8979)]. Whether these are the bones of those massacred at Skull Pocket may be open to question, however, it does at least confirm the collection of a large number of skulls and suggests the likelihood of a nefarious act(s) having taken place.
Tindale, Expedition Diary, 1938, pp. 413-17.
'Coyyan', Cairns Post Jubilee Supplement, 1 November 1926, p.19.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 147-148, 236-7, n.59, n.60, n.61, n.62, n.63, n.64.
See entry for 18 October for continuation of this account.