September 9.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Disproportionate killing
‘I call that murder’
[As regards a minority of colonists historian] John West noted that ‘among the whites, there were men distinguished for the malicious vigour with which they tracked and murdered the native people’. [1] One settler admitted ‘that it was a favourite amusement to hunt the aborigines’. [2] When another later bragged about participating in massacres, his interlocutor rebuked him: ‘I call that murder’! Surprised and indignant, he retorted:
Nothing of the sort, you don’t know anything about it. It was doing a noble service to shoot them down. Of course, we used to spare a young female occasionally when we got a chance, and kept her for a few days before we shot her. [3]
West, History of Tasmania, Vol. II, p. 18.
Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, p. 172.
Fenton, Fenton of Forth, p. 201.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter – First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021, p.135, 249 n.47, n.48, n.49.
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The killing of whites and the disproportionate revenge killing of Aboriginal people.
In early September three men working the Mount Haywood copper load were attacked outside their camp. John Landers, Henry Roberts and Johannes Noltenius were all speared as they ran for the safety of their camp. Roberts who had passed out when wounded, regained consciousness after the attack and removed most of the spears from his companions' bodies. Returning to the camp they found the dead body of the cook, Schollert. The three wounded men tried to make it to Glencoe, a cattle station on the Daly River, but Landers and Noltenius were so weak they had to be left along the way. Roberts alone arrived at the station and arranged for help to be sent back, but when the rescue party arrived, both Landers and Noltenius were dead, and the camp was plundered. When the police investigated, it appeared that both men had been not only speared but also shot, presumably with their own revolvers. [1]
Immediately the Northern Division of the Territory's police, under the direction of Inspector Paul Foelsche, organised a party to respond to the murders. Led by Corporal [George] Montagu, the police were to capture 'any members of the tribe who committed the Daly River murders...and hold them as hostages until the actual murderers are given up'. [2] Corporal Montagu's report documents 20-30 Aboriginal deaths, but other contemporary reports suggest between 70-150, and modern estimates are higher. [3] In his report of the expedition, Montagu admitted that 'what the other parties out have done I do not know, but I believe the natives have received such a lesson this time as will exercise a salutary effect over the survivors in time to come'. He concluded: 'One result of this expedition has been to convince me of the superiority of the Martini-Henry rifle, both for accuracy of aim and quickness of action.' [4]
Gordon Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 99-100.
Baker to Parsons,9 September 1884, cited in Tony Austin, Simply the Survival of the Fittest: Aboriginal Administration in South Australia's Northern Territory 1863-1910, Historical Society of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 1992, p.17.
Austin, p. 19.
Cited in Reid, p. 104.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Wilshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 19-20, 188 n.12, n.13, n.14, n.15.