September 1.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Memory of a major massacre
Further reflection on the Coniston massacre.*
During 1928 Central Australia was suffering from prolonged drought. Competition between Aborigines and cattlemen intensified as the country dried out and bush tucker became harder to harvest. The Walpiri and Arrente clans clustered around scarce water sources. Cattle killing increased as hunger invaded the bush camps. Pastoralists demanded police protection as rumour of black vengeance passed back and forth among the scattered white station community. Randall Stafford, the manager of Coniston station, was warned that Aborigines were coming in from the desert to kill him. He asked the Alice Springs police to take decisive action.
But an already threatening atmosphere worsened dramatically when on 7 August the dingo trapper and local identity Fred Brooks was killed and his mutilated body thrust into an enlarged rabbit burrow. He had taken an Aboriginal woman from a camp beside a soak on Coniston station and had refused to return her or to supply the gifts expected as part of the exchange. But in the eyes of the white community nothing could excuse or extenuate the guilt which was not individual but collective. The cry went up, unanimous and collective – the blacks must be taught a lesson that they will never forget. The scene was set for Australia's last official punitive expedition and one of its most brutal and unrestrained. It was led by Gallipoli veteran and hardened bushman Mounted Constable George Murray. He knew what was expected of him. But while anger welled in the settler community the news of the murder of Brooks alarmed the bush camps. White fella violence was bad at any time. When driven by vengeance and fierce racial solidarity, it was awesome. The historians Peter and Jay Read, having listened to Walpiri recollections of the period, wrote:
One can only guess at the fear that gripped the heart when a Walpiri or Arrente messenger, breathless and shaking, stumbled into the bush camps to cry out that the whites had begun killing every Aborigine they found. [1]
Murray's party of eight well-armed horsemen left Coniston station on 16 August and returned to a hero's welcome in Alice Springs on 1 September. They brought two Aboriginal men, Padygar and Arkirka, with them. Murray returned to the bush again for three weeks in late September and early October to take revenge for an attack on the legendary bushman Nuggett Morton. Murray eventually conceded that 31 Aborigines had been killed. It is likely that at least 100 died during that month of murder. Old Walpiri recorded in the 1970s were still haunted by childhood memories of atrocity;
They yardem round, bringem to one mob, see, make it one heap.
And they shottit.
Two or three shotgun is goin', people is goin'...
They comen there now, chasem round now, some all run away
Right, prisonem whole lot, everyone
Tiem up longa trees...
And shootem whole lot, some feller, shootem, heapem up. [2]
P. & J. Read, eds., Long Time, Olden Time, Institute of Aboriginal development, Alice Springs, 1991, p.34. See also T. Cribbin, The Killing Times, Fontana, Sydney, 1984.
P. & J. Read, op. Cit., pp.49-50; Cribbin, op. Cit., p.164.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 191-193, 266 n.39, n.40.
*For a fuller account of the Coniston massacre, see the entry for 13 August.